House or Home? Recent Grads’ Strategies of Stickin’ Around

Do you love your Harvard house? Do you love dorm life, with the weird sounds the radiator makes that have become incorporated into your dreams? Believe it or not, there are many who love house life even more than you.

These mysterious individuals — whose house spirit pays their rent — are former students of Harvard College. All of them have graduated, and most hold jobs remotely or in Boston. And yet on campus they remain. They sleep among undergrads, they eat among undergrads. Harvard houses bestow upon them titles such as “House Elves” or “Faculty Dean Aides.”

No more than four rooms in the dorms or in faculty deans’ residences of each house are earmarked every year for these people who love Harvard so much that they stay, simultaneously building community and operating in the shadows. In Lowell, aides help organize Lowell Tea, and in Cabot, they prepare newsletter content. In Quincy, aides bake in bulk for the faculty deans’ famous open houses, cook for events such as “Feast and Film,” and organize Quincy’s Junior Family Weekend.

Who are these quasi-staff who provide programming to students and facilitate house life? And why do they choose to stick around?

Former Quincy elf Elizabeth F. Jacobson ’16 explains that the purpose of the house aide position is to help recent graduates who go on to graduate school, become educators, or who continue to work at Harvard to be able to afford living in the Cambridge area. With room and board and dining hall food included in the deal, there’s no denying the practical appeal of the house aide role.

But there is a personal aspect, too. Jacobson, a former player on the Crimson’s field hockey team who transitioned to the role of assistant coach after graduation, describes “learning how to be a more confident woman” as she worked as an aide. “I felt like more of a team member with house staff,” she says, as she became a part of maintaining the house over successive generations of penguins.

Many aides were highly involved in house life as undergraduates. They were the students whose names faculty deans didn’t have to memorize from pictures online, the students who made up homecoming committees or organized housing day videos.

For many house aides like Tyler Morris ’22, taking on the role is simply a logical progression of their love for their house. “Quincy House is a special part of my identity,” Morris says. He expects it always will be.

Ivor K. Zimmerman ’23 works as a house aide at Kirkland House and as a research assistant for David Deming, one of the Kirkland faculty deans. When asked whether he considers Kirkland a home, he says, “Absolutely, I wouldn’t have stayed if it wasn’t.”

Jacobson, whose tenure of five years as an aide was longer than most, formed a close relationship with the Quincy faculty deans. She had the time to participate in intramurals and campus events that she wasn’t able to as an undergraduate.

“I got to see Harvard through a different lens,” Jacobson says.

House administrators prefer in some cases for house aides to have taken time away from Harvard to facilitate their transitions to professional roles at the house, says Cabot House administrator Palmer Berry. Some houses prefer former students who did not live in their house as undergraduates, to encourage distance from college life.

But many house aides do not face problems shifting to a professional role. “It’s kind of a bridge between these two chapters of working and academic life,” says Ethan J. McFarlin ’24, a Leverett House faculty dean aide.

According to McFarlin, continuing to help teach classes he TF’d as an undergraduate has helped him know how to take on the advisory, supportive role of house aide less than four months after his graduation.

In some houses such as Quincy, there is so much competition for the position of house elf that deans will only consider former house alumni for the role. Morris says that most elves stay for about two years, but as long as they continue to contribute fresh ideas and engage with the Quincy undergraduates, their role’s duration is flexible and indefinite.

The house aide role is, of course, not the only way students can remain a part of Harvard house life after graduation. A few return as resident tutors while attending Harvard graduate programs, though thousands apply each year to fill those positions in each Harvard house. At Cabot House, the artist in residence program provides a sole former student a suite in exchange for house programming in their field of expertise.

Zimmerman, describing his life at Kirkland, says, “It’s almost like being an undergrad again!” Almost. For better or worse, it’s not quite the same.

— Magazine writer Sierra A. Lloyd can be reached at sierra.lloyd@thecrimson.com.