During their first year of college students face new challenges: lectures replace classes, professors replace teachers and a dormitory replaces the home.

When first-years arrive in the fall, many find the toughest adjustment is learning to live with each other.

Before the year even starts, the Freshman Dean's Office (FDO) does its best to minimize roommate strife by sending incoming first-years a lengthy questionaire to help match them with compatible roommates.

For example, the form asks students about their sleep patterns about their sleep patterns and musical taste. But some students still hate their roommates' show tunes or alternative music or 10 p.m. bedtime.

After fourteen hours of Garth Brooks, some first-years begin to question the attention paid to their rooming forms.

"The administrators get together, close their eyes, and point," one skeptical student says of the assignment process.

But the administrators themselves say the process is a little more complex.

The three assistant deans of freshman, David B. Fithian, Eleanor A. Sparagana and D.E. Lorraine Sterritt, each assign rooms to a third of the incoming first-years.

"It is a really fun and exiting process which takes us almost two months in the summer," Sparagana says. "It is imperfect, but we do try to make everyone feel at home when they arrive at Harvard in the fall."

Sparagana says there is no magic formula for creating a rooming group. But, she says, some of the most important criteria include how many roommates students want and how social they want their room to be.

"Those seem more enduring and important than some of the other more minor things for overall harmony in a room," she says.

Sparagana says the deans try to find the right balance between common interests and diverse backgrounds. A goal of the FDO is that roommates learn from each other, she says.

The process doesn't lend itself to exact groupings, Sparagana says, because the deans rely on hard-to-quantify information.

In addition to basic facts like sleeping hours and musical taste, the rooming form also asks students to describe themselves in more general terms. Sparagana says that while some self-descriptions seem unusual to her they probably made perfect sense to the students who wrote them.

"Some people designate themselves as muppet fans or Beatles fans," Sparagana says. "Some people want to bring pets, including lizards and snakes, but we tell them no."