On this apartment day, quad every second year – seriously | Opinion

Last year we lost the housing lottery. Maybe everyone should.

We are two block comrades who live in Cabot House. After the publication of the residential broadcast results in the last month, one of us will move to Lowell House and one of us will remain in Cabot for the time being.

The Crimson has spilled a lot of ink in Harvard – blocking groups, link groups, transmission applications and general dissatisfaction that accompanies them – and every spring semester is dominated by the stress and excitement of the apartment day. The primary danger will of course exist.

We want to put an end to this existential fear. A better Harvard would compensate for the housing. Just as the farm is the home for new students, the quad should be accommodated every second year.

Unfortunately, it is an inevitable product of geography that some students have easier than others. Harvard's current randomization model fears to be “quademed” or to be a little less than a mile from Harvard's main campus in one of the three houses. This problem only gets worse when the renovation work on the river house has been completed, and Quad houses lose their claim to be the only escape valve of rats and crumbling plaster.

Our solution? Two days of residence. The first for new students would determine in which Quad house they are placed. For the second time, the students would find out which river house they will live as juniors and seniors.

Take into account the social advantages of compensating for the experiences of quad and river students. Quad residents would no longer see Harvard -shuttles watching home with envy on their river colleagues. The quad would become a common experience: another Harvard Yard, but in the Garden Street.

This new system would also relieve the stress of choosing a blocking group just a few months after the first year. At the moment, if you don't block someone, you can be removed up to a 30 -minute walk. Our proposal reduces this ceiling to a few minutes between the second years.

In addition, the pupils would have the opportunity to choose a second blocking group for the second half of their college experience -an opportunity that we are confident that many students would consider a recently taken into account, which showed that a considerable part of the juniors and seniors no longer seem to live with their block mats for the year of the year.

Two days of residence, two blocking groups and twice as much fun.

By sharing the quad experience among all students in the second year, we also suspect that accommodation that strains the college and contributed to the end of the link groups would decrease. With the social burden on the quad, the students will not search for river housings so desperately.

We can already predict some of the administration concerns.

On the one hand, some may fear that the quad is simply not big enough to record everyone in the second year. However, some people will inevitably need the apartment closer to the river, and Harvard would have the additional space for those who need it.

Administrators could also hesitate to separate juniors and seniors in the second year. However, this essentially works how the houses are already working.

Official events on the construction of the community structure of community are often due to the fact that a lot of bubble tea is drunk in a dining room. For us, houses are integrated horizontally – in the second year in the second year in the second year – integrated as vertically between the classes. In our experience, every community that exceeds the class years is created, usually from common courses or non -school out -of -school, not from shared apartments. The commissioning of the Sophomores to live together in the quad, while juniors and seniors occupy the river, would strengthen the community instead of weakening it.

At the moment the quad feels like purgatory: On the day of the apartment we have already dealt with transmission options. Due to the blowing of the transfer applications, the matter is only worse and the buy-in reduces from the beginning of the second year, while blocking groups are divided until the end.

Yes, there are steps that Harvard could take to make the quad more appealing without revising the entire system, e.g. B. the frequency of the shuttle, the expansion of hot breakfast or the renovation of living space.

But the true gap between the quad and the river is not a question of amenities, but of geography. It was time for Harvard to revise the housing. It has the opportunity to build a stronger community and a fairer life for your students. The university should bend into what it can do best: to strain us – equally.

To be honest, we don't hate the quad and we enjoyed our year there. But we want to have our transfer application cake and also eat it. Request for a year in the quad and then give us the river.

Catherine EF Previn '27, an Associate editor, is a government concentrator in Cabot House. S. Mac Healey '27, a purple editorial comperier, is a concentrator for social studies that move from Cabot House to Lowell House.