In my opinion, Harvard’s House system is an amazing way to promote camaraderie on campus. To me, it’s such a brilliant way to allow students to reap the benefits of a large university while benefiting from the tighter knit communities a smaller institution may offer (and no I have not been paid by admissions to say this).
Blocking, on the other hand, is a broken system. I don’t have the answer as to how to fix it, but I can tell you I don’t think it coincides with the community and camaraderie the House system is supposed to provide. As much as upperclassmen reiterate that your blocking group doesn’t have to be comprised of all of your best friends whom you love, when you’re immersed in it, making the groups, asking people whether they value your friendship as much as you value theirs, that isn’t the point. What makes the concept of blocking terrible is that no matter what, it promotes the very exclusivity that Harvard so badly wants to distance itself from. No, there’s no punch or rush or comp to get in. Yes, you can always technically float. But no matter how much everyone downplays it, at least when you’re a freshman, the stigma is there.
Before I came to Harvard I didn’t think twice about blocking. It made sense to me that you should be able to choose who you want to live with in your House. Obviously I would totally have one friend group containing eight people who would all live well together. My first cue that something was off was when I’d mention blocking offhand to friends and family who reacted staunchly.
“So you choose within a couple months who you’ll live with for the rest of your time in college?” my grandma asked me. “But I didn’t meet my best friend until junior year!”
I listened, but I lived in deep denial. At Harvard, surely, having had such a system in place for so long, things must be different. People must just make their best friends right away. That’s just the way it’s got to be.
And then I got here. It’s not as if I didn’t make friends. I would consider myself a fairly socially adjusted person. I consistently had plans on the weekends. There were lots of people I genuinely enjoyed spending time with here and thought felt the same about me. But there was one issue: I was (and to an extent still am) a floater. I didn’t have The Group. I spend my time with lots of different people who don’t all know each other. When I do spend my time with a formed group, I am affiliated with it, but not in it. And that’s partially because I realized pretty quickly I didn’t want to confine myself to that kind of life. Especially not right away. How could you possibly know that you want to stick with a singular small group of people all the time in only a few short months when there are over 1,600 people in your class alone? So perhaps unconsciously, I had allowed myself the freedom to find the best friends for me without feeling that confinement. That is something I am now extremely grateful I did. But for a long time it felt like a mistake. Getting ready to go on winter break it felt like everyone here finally had their social lives in order. Everyone had someone with whom they could block. And I felt stranded.
My tendency to hang out with individuals rather than groups left me feeling I couldn’t really ask people to block because they all had more important friends. I wondered whether those who I valued enough to live with valued me in the same way. Blocking made me think of myself in terms of an asset. In prepping myself, I’d think, Would I be worth enough for these people?
But as unique as I felt my situation was for a good while there, I’m now fairly convinced that dilemmas like mine are not uncommon for freshmen here during the blocking process. Like I said, coming to a completely new place and meeting new people is an incredibly vulnerable thing. And again, it is ridiculous to know exactly who your friends are going to be for the rest of your time here. And so, I’ve noticed, all of these freshmen are left scrambling so they’re not that person who still doesn’t have a group or even a group that’s big enough to be considered acceptable. Groups crumble because people don’t get along or people would prefer certain friends over others, and then people are left alone at the last minute. And though many people, in traditional Harvard fashion, have kept their cool throughout this process, for months now I’ve watched as my classmates cling to each other, desperate to not be that odd one out. This is absolutely not camaraderie. On the contrary, blocking is where exclusivity goes and thrives.
Despite all of my winter break anxiety, I ended up with pretty much the luckiest situation possible. Though I did switch groups once, I ended up with a blocking group of people I am genuinely stoked to live with for three years. (Our group name is 30 Blockefeller Plaza. I mean, come on.) But though my situation isn’t the only one of its kind, I know now it is in most cases the exception rather than the rule.
The dumbest part is I feel like, just as upperclassmen tell us time and time again, it really doesn’t matter who you block with. You can always switch houses. You can room with people outside your group. And at the end of the day, if worse comes to worse, it is only three years of your life. But that kind of foresight shouldn’t be assumed of these, again, incredibly vulnerable freshmen, meeting tons of new people for the first time while trying to figure out who they are and what they want to do in life.
Like I said, I love the House system at Harvard. I don’t think the solution lies in moving towards the systems of schools like Yale and Princeton, where students are sorted into their Residential Colleges freshman year. To me, this defeats the purpose of branching out in a larger institution because you are then confined even further to only living with people who happen to have been randomly assigned to the same College as you. But I believe the concept of blocking is inherently broken too.
Personally, I am pumped for housing day. But I am fully aware of how lucky I am to be so pumped. I am cognizant of the countless silent freshmen who will be secretly wishing their groups were better or bigger or fuller or existent at all. I am cognizant of how many people were rejected by groups because they weren’t cool enough or whatever it may have been. In a year we’ll all look back and laugh at the stressful toll blocking took on us. All upperclassmen seem to do it. But for now it is all too real, and in my opinion, all too unnecessary.