On a rainy Tuesday morning in Adams House A entryway, Rosa E. Beltran ’08, armed with a yellow sponge, is surveying her opponent. She’s brisk, she’s efficient, and she’s cheerier than she has to be considering she’s about to tackle a toilet in a senior suite.

Snapping on her rubber gloves—the job would be “pretty gross” without them, she admits—she sprays on Mur-Kil (Dorm Crew’s disinfectant of choice), dips the sponge in the bowl, and gives the porcelain a scrub, finishing up with a last swipe, rinse, and flush. Although she has just achieved in five minutes what some of her accomplished fellow classmates will go four years without doing, she waxes philosophical about the experience.

“It definitely requires that you kind of get over yourself about certain aspects,” Beltran says. “It’s rather relaxing.”

Beltran is one of approximately 120 workers that are employed with Dorm Crew term-time, and she will join about 400 students working Spring Clean-Up in the next few weeks, according to a Dorm Crew head captain, Robyn M. Orfitelli ’06.

Beltran is also one of 17 trial captains this year who are supervising crews at Spring Clean-Up, during which they will be considered for full captain positions come fall.

Dorm Crew—a student-managed division of Harvard’s Facilities Maintenance Operations—is Harvard’s headquarters for cleaning and other maintenance functions. During the term, Orfitelli says Dorm Crew must keep cleaning supplies in stock and organize them; it also deals with superintendents, deans, and Yard Ops in addition to handling its own taxes and payroll of over $1 million each year.

Besides serving as the main hub, Dorm Crew’s office in the basement of Weld Hall acts as a pit stop for freshmen bathroom supplies. Orfitelli estimates that on average the Dorm Crew office gives out 320 rolls of toilet paper every week. That’s 24,200 square feet of toilet paper every 7 days, enough to cover half a football field.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE YUCKY

When she’s cleaning, Beltran usually brings along her iPod or uses the time for reflection—most of the theses for her Expos papers this year came to her while she was working.

It’s not that she hasn’t experienced some setbacks during the last year. There was the time she accidentally flushed away her sponge and worried she was going to lose her job; there was the time she ran out of glass cleaner; there was the time when she was asked to dispose of a suspicious glob in a bathtub.

“It was definitely not soap or anything that should be in the bathtub,” Beltran recalls.

Despite the significant yuck factor, students say that one of the appeals of Dorm Crew is that it is an efficiently-run organization.

Along with cleaning an estimated two-thirds of the private bathrooms on campus, the extra programs Dorm Crew runs are what make it the largest student-run fee-for-service organization in the world, according to Orfitelli.

“That’s pretty awesome for a bunch of 18- to 21-year-old people to be doing,” Orfitelli says. “Given that it’s entirely student-run, [the organization] is extraordinarily professional and streamlined.”

It was the possibility of advancement in such an organization that kept Beltran scrubbing sinks, showers, and toilets for an entire year.