Sam Woolf most house spirit:

Now, three months after her injury, Woolf has been nominated for Most House Spirit. When our photographer and I meet her, she’s watching the sun on the river from a Dunster common room, standing next to a moose head costume. “These are for you,” she says, handing over two drinks: a mix of Raspberry Royale black tea, honey, half and half, and whipped cream.

Woolf tells me she was born and raised in Hamilton, New Jersey; the state “looks like an old man hunched over, and I live in his throat.” Since her junior year, she has also been one of Dunster’s IM representatives. Every week, Woolf spends eight to 10 hours publicizing events and attending games, sometimes in the moose suit.

With a few minutes remaining in the intramural soccer game, Sam M. Woolf ’22 was tapped to sub in for Dunster. Her team was up 4-1 against Cabot, and she proceeded to play the “best minute and a half of soccer in my life,” she remembers. “I was flying across that field.”

Then an opposing player kicked the ball directly into her face from close range. Blood started gushing everywhere.

What at first seemed like a black eye turned out to be a broken nose and traumatic iritis. “My pupil was a horizontal oval instead of a circle,” she says. She shows me a picture of herself in recovery: eye patch, nose cast, grinning. A friend originally gave her the eye patch as a joke (“thank you Pierson!”) but it turned out to be useful when at first she couldn’t wear contacts in that eye, or glasses on her nose. Luckily, she says, her schedule this semester (“shoutout Expos 40. Kate is the best preceptor ever”) meant that she was still mostly able to participate in classwork.

During her recovery, Woolf emphasizes the support she felt from the Dunster community. “People helping me out with ice packs, I got a card from Rachel, our house administrator,” she says. “Dunster is never short on love, but it was quite the experience.”

When she became a rep, she says, all the events were remote because of Covid, which meant replacing volleyball or frisbee with events like wall-sitting competitions and “cookie face races” — trying to move a cookie from your forehead to your mouth using only facial muscles. By the time Woolf got back to campus, all the other reps had graduated. She recruited a few of her friends (“shoutout Alan and Kylie and Pierson!”) to help rebuild.

“We had no institutional memory of how IMs had been run, so we did our best to muddle through it,” she says. “And we got really lucky. There was a lot of buy-in from everyone in Dunster.”

Buying in, as Woolf sees it, means engaging with House community without expecting much other than community in return. This is something I’ve been thinking about: how in contrast to the culture of hyperwork and pre-professionalism that permeates Harvard, IMs stand out as fun, low-stakes activities. Woolf is ahead of me.

“When I was a snotty sophomore going into junior year, I was like, ‘IMs? How’s this going to help me in the future?’” She laughs. “But then I actually did it and I was like, ‘Wow, this is great. My quality of life is so great right now.’”

Midway through the conversation, Jorge Mendoza,