The housing office decided to change the procedure for selecting your room from a “lottery” to a “randomly generated priority number.” For those confused by the two terms, let me clarify: They’re the same thing.
It makes a lot of students think they would be able to get a single suite in Kemper Hall, hoping they would have as close as one can get to apartment life on campus. Unfortunately, a lottery still exists, and as long as such incredible variability exists between rooms here you’ll have many students going nuts over being stuck in so-and-so hellhole.
Though the new procedure fixed many other problems, it created a few new ones in the process. The mob scene in the Foster-Walker Complex for rising sophomores was sometimes unbearable.
“I thought I was going to die,” said Weinberg freshman Caitlin Buysse. “They had 1,000 through 1,250 all in one room, and when the 1,000s were going … the 1,250s were pushing to the front.”
Freshman miseducation also remains high. Upperclassmen have been conditioned to accept housing here as a tool of Satan, but you naive little freshmen just don’t know better. Planning your future around drawing number 1 and getting off the meal plan, for example, is probably not a good idea.
To curb the impact of the annual Northwestern Housing Whine that largely results from this, I suggest changing the wording of the application procedures to be incredibly demotivational. It should begin with a statement that students have to go through the normal procedure, but they will be inexplicably stuck in Jones Residential College and forgotten by the human race. And if they don’t follow the procedure with surgical precision, they will be assigned an unfurnished tent on the roof of Harris Hall. That way students won’t have any reason to complain when they don’t get the room they really want.
Few people understand the realistic implications of our seemingly random system, and Undergraduate Housing should take steps in the coming years to publish comprehensive portrayals of room demand — by dorm, by campus region, and by room capacity (single, double, etc.) — so students know how to plan.
According to Mark D’Arienzo, associate director of undergraduate housing, the room assignment now goes according to the type of room you want, rather than the dorm. Many people — myself included — consider a dorm’s scene important to their living arrangements. To this end housing should at least judge individual demands of North and South Campus for types of rooms, or possibly Bobb and McCulloch halls versus everywhere else.
Furthermore, they could handle crowds better by moving the room-assignment procedure to a larger space, or spreading it across more time. These changes would reduce student headaches and would help the housing office use its already-strapped time to better serve us.
Still, no matter how hard we try, there will always be people who aren’t satisfied.
“There were girls who wanted to ‘reserve’ spots for their friends, (telling you) ‘You’d better not take such and such a room,'” Buysse said.
To the offending ditz(es): I’m sorry that walking five minutes to hang out with your friends is so taxing for you. Here — why don’t you live someplace close to the rest of campus, like Elder Hall?
Nick Disabato is a McCormick junior. He can be reached at [email protected].
