Red Tape Hits Housing: Months-long housing lottery process changes to 15 minutes

Visual by Alicia Toldi

In one of the final study abroad meetings of the semester, many juniors brought with them a lot of anxiety and questions about leaving the continent. However, they were also introduced to a concept that many of them felt more surprising then travel concerns: the new electronic process for housing selection. Gone will be the worries of having to bind friends into the sometimes taxing contract of being proxies, and sending updates through Skype and email. But with it, students may lose the comfort and safety that the more drawn-out, manual process offers.

The previous housing selection process began with a quick online registration in mid-February, and the receipt of a lottery number in early April. Lower numbers meant earlier dorm selection, while higher numbers meant earlier room selection, both respective to class year. A week would come in which each day was dedicated to a particular class, and on different sections of that day, students would go to the 1962 room to begin the first step of selecting their dorm.

During dorm selection, the 1962 Room was divided into two sides, the first of which was basically a waiting room. Each dorm was designated a certain number of spots for male and female students, and for a certain number of students from each class year. Housefellows, Floor Governors and other Residential Living staff oversaw the process. Students waited in chairs, praying for their number to be called while trying to calculate the difference between their place in line and the number of available rooms in the dorms they wanted. After making their selection officially they proceeded to the other side of the room and signed their names to a list with the Housefellow of their chosen dorm.

Room selection was a different story. Students piled into their dorm common rooms and were called up one by one by original lottery number, to select a room from a dorm floor plan.

The new housing process will combine these two selection processes into a single event that can be done from any computer, be it in the basement of Larrabee, the second floor of Shain or an internet café in Ho Chi Minh City.

Each student’s number will place him or her in a virtual queue of all students, including those who are applying for specialty housing. Marie Lalor, the Assistant Director of Residential Education and Living, offered me a chance to look at the new online registration process.

Now more of a questionnaire than anything, the online form has fields in which to enter a request for single-sex or specialty housing. This will replace the need for a written application, an idea Lalor seemed very happy about, as she pointed out the massive box on her shelf that held all of last year’s applications. The registration form will be accessible through Self Service on CamelWeb, and at least 250 students have already used a more simplified version to register for Winter Break housing.

Additionally, upperclassmen will notice that “priority” has been removed from the housing selection process entirely. Priority was a promised boost in the lottery given to students living in basement rooms or in Lazarus House. Lalor believed priority didn’t fit into their new system, and the need for such a boost seems to have faded. “The President invested a half million dollars in the basements,” she explained, “and this year Lazarus filled completely voluntarily.”

Housing selection will take place online over the course of a week, much like course registration, starting with a day for specialty housing and then opening up to each class in order of descending seniority. Students will be given a two-minute window of time based on their lottery number to select a dorm and room at the same time, a development that some see as unfair compared to the dual weighting of the previous lottery number system. Students may still make their choice after their two-minute window has passed, but with every subsequent two minutes, a new student will be added to the system. When asked about the psychological concerns of making such an important selection in such a short time, Lalor said she saw the new system as a means of deconstructing the larger frustrations of the older selection process.

“Instead of being anxious for a month and a half, they will simply have an intense 15 minutes,” she said.

She considered the old system’s multiple meetings to be drawing the focus of the student body for far too long a time.

Another popular concern has to do with something the creators of this new system seem to pride themselves on: the inclusion of study abroad students. Under the previous system, juniors abroad in the spring semester would have to find friends to serve as proxies for them, granting these friends the power to make all of their housing decisions for them. The new system will be accessible by anyone with an Internet connection, and Lalor promised there will be a clock displaying the time at Connecticut College so students abroad may orient themselves easily. However, some students going farther away are worried about logistics. Lalita Russ ’12 is going to Nepal this spring. There is a ten hour and forty-five minute time difference between Nepal and Eastern Standard Time. To make matters worse, she said, “We won’t have internet in our house.”

Last spring, the College, with the support of the Residential Life Advisory Committee, purchased software to create electronic housing registration, called The Housing Director, from Adirondack Solutions. The software seems to have a mixture of benefits and drawbacks, but the product is already in use at a variety of schools, including Quinnipiac University and URI, and Lalor says it is customizable enough that she hopes to work around these problems.

One necessary change was the designation of rooms in a dorm as class-specific, because The Housing Director cannot recognize fifteen rooms available to seniors in a given dorm, but rather must know which specific fifteen rooms are available. This year, the college is redoing its dorm floor plans, and with the software Res. Life will be able to integrate these images in the selection process to better inform students of their options.

The classification of rooms will be partially based on what students selected last year for rooms and partially based Res Life’s assessment of appropriate rooms for each class year.  When Russ heard about this at her meeting, she said the need for this was a shame, and that she had always felt it was “kind of cool to meet new people living around you just based on randomness.” This stratification is not totally inflexible, as rising sophomores on the singles waiting list can still be given junior rooms that open up every semester.

In another case, students applying for group housing will have to pair with students in their own class year. While some students may be opposed to this change, the tradeoff is that groups will now have much more control over their end of the process. A number of spots in each dorm that would favor group housing have been reserved for them. Additionally, if a group is left only with their last-choice dorm, instead of being locked into that arrangement (as in the old process) they are given the ability to disband at the last minute to seek out individual rooms.

Lalor and the office of Residential Education and Living view The Housing Director as an important tool for students all year long. Self Service now includes a button labeled “MyHousing,” which is a link to your current housing information. With all this information easily available online to students and Res. Life staff, processes that had previously taken weeks can now be done instantaneously. Lalor championed the software as giving students a higher level of involvement and more control over room management, and she stressed that the customizability of the software was helping to generate a lot of ideas for its potential uses. One such idea is one week in May devoted entirely to room exchange.

Formerly, students who were unsatisfied with their room would fill out an application to Res. Life and hope other students might be trying to switch as well. Now, students will be able to see the available rooms and do their swapping on Self Service.

Dan Whittington, ’11, who has been through the housing selection process many times, believes that regardless of how good the software is, the real threat to the new process going smoothly is the school’s 100 MB/s network. With hundreds of students going on the network each day of the selection week, constantly refreshing Self Service, he considers people getting blocked out or the website crashing to be very likely.

“When problems and lag still affect the course selection process,” Whittington argued, “how could Res. Life not expect room selection to go worse?”

Still, while it’s easy to focus on concerns over this new process, the student staff of Residential Education and Living had its fair share of difficulties surrounding last year’s housing selection days. To them, the old system was being to show signs of straining. Alicia Rea ’12, who has been a floor governor for two years, described the selection process as “utter chaos,” from sixty-plus people all vying to snag the corner rooms of Wright, to people who had not signed a contract trying to sneak into the larger rooms of a substance-free floor in Smith.

“People would try to bribe you, or sweet talk their way into dorms,” she said.

Rea also felt that this electronic method would make Housefellows’ and Floor Governors’ jobs easier. Lalor confirmed that the Residential Education and Living staff was working full-tilt, and that during the week of housing selection, students and other staff were working until midnight every night. Rea added that last year, residential staff had to begin planning for the housing process in early December.

As of now, electronic room selection has not been totally finalized. While some of these changes may be very new and surprising to people, they are still being tweaked, and Residential Education and Living seems willing to take any and all student feedback on the matter. The inconspicuous nature of its development was primarily because the Residential Life Advisory Committee still has many decisions to make about the process in general, as well as Lalor and staff’s feeling that students already “had enough to worry about in December.” •