REAL’s Two-Minute Housing Drill

Not too many weeks ago, most everyone on campus was up at the ungodly hour of 7 AM, going over their schedules class by class, looking for overlaps and conflicts and double-checking CRNs. By the end of the flurry of typing and clicking, when course registration was finished, I had only gotten into two of my desired classes and I felt lucky. Walking to chemistry shortly after, I found that most of my friends had only a blank screen to look at while the classes vital to their prospective majors rapidly filled up. I heard multiple stories of people being blocked out of classes even though there were clearly spots open, and a few of classmates who couldn’t get into any classes at all. Class registration is not the smoothest process. Do we really want to depend on this system to pick where we’ll be living next academic year?

I’m a freshman, so I have not experienced the housing registration of old, in which students crowded into the 1962 in Cro waiting for lottery numbers to be called. It sounds pretty cumbersome. But to change the system this radically in one bound without testing seems risky. The new housing registration process—which will take place online and give each student exactly two minutes to sign up for both a room and a house before another student is given the chance to snag the spot they want—seems destined for major complications. We just experienced a week-long wireless meltdown with lingering effects, so I’m skeptical of the overall network. Even without a major Internet hang-up, the bandwidth at Conn doesn’t seem to be built for such a large mass of people constantly refreshing windows over an extended period of time. Hypothetically, if the page takes thirty seconds to load, it leaves students just ninety seconds to navigate and make these crucial decisions.

There’s also something that just logistically didn’t make sense to me. As I understand it, the registration process is meant to take place over the course of a week. Each class will be assigned a day and a string of two-minute sessions will open up one after another. Connecticut College has an undergraduate population of roughly 1,900. Through the power of math I know that there are about 475 students per grade. Multiply that by two minutes per student and you have fifteen hours and change. That’s a large chunk of the day. How can this work when some students are sure to have class during their window? What about people who have sports practice, or a job shift during which internet isn’t readily available? What about people who are studying abroad who might not be able to use the internet for days at a time?

The Office of Residential Education and Living (REAL) explained the solution they have in place for such issues. Before registration, each student will fill out a survey that ranks room types and residential houses in order of preference. Based upon this survey, REAL administrators will act as proxies, picking your room and dorm for you during your window if you are not able to do so. Having a stranger make this quick and stressful decision for me sounds terrifying, but it also seems to be the best solution under this new system.

Yet there’s something about the new registration process that bothers me even more than the shaky logistics. I live in the basement of JA and it sucks. From having to share one shower with twelve other guys, putting up with the smell emanating from the room where they store all the garbage, having a window from which I can only see peoples’ feet, dealing with the janitorial and kitchen staff loudly arriving to their offices at 6:30 AM and having the slowest internet connection anywhere, I believe that those students condemned to the sub-ground floors deserve at least a little bit of an edge when it comes time to registering for housing. But no—under this new online system, all priority has been removed.

I’ve heard about all the money that’s been poured into the basements, but better lighting and a fresh coat of paint do not detract from the fact that basement rooms are still in the basement. We’re at much greater risk of flooding than any other floor (many people have heard horror stories from last semester) and I know that at least in JA, the basement is the coldest and darkest place in the entire dorm.

But don’t think I’ve forgotten about members of Lazrus House, the other students negatively affected by this news. According to Marie Lalor, the assistant director of the REAL office, the logic behind taking priority away from the students in Laz is that the dorm “filled up completely voluntarily this year,” which I consider misleading. First of all, there are still rooms open according to several students who live in the dorm. Second, based on the conversations I had with a few of the house’s residents, Lazrus was far from being number one on their lists and many of the students who live there do so because they have no other choice. It’s also the only dorm on campus which offers year-round housing. The drawbacks of living there are pretty apparent: Laz is old, which means no AC and spotty heating. The rooms are small, as is the dorm itself, and there are serious problems like cracks in walls and ceilings.

While I’m at it, why don’t students who live in quads get any priority? Apparently they never have, but I think they deserve it, too. I know a lot of students who live in these crammed rooms and get along perfectly well with their roommates, but that doesn’t change the fact that they get two to three times less privacy than most of us. And I’ve only seen a few rooms that actually look large enough to accommodate three, let alone four people. The fact of the matter is that some students at Conn have been forced to live in worse conditions than the rest, and for putting up with those conditions for six months I believe they deserve at least a tiny bit of favor when it comes time to pick rooms for the next academic year.

When I first heard that registration was adopting an online format, I thought it sounded like a smart way to streamline the process. But after hearing the details and thinking about the logistics of it all, the old method of doing things began to sound better and better. The elimination of priority is a mistake, and the two-minute windows sound too inflexible for such an important decision. While there are some aspects of this new process that are promising, and while there is a chance that everything could all turn out just fine, I can’t help but feel that all the students applying for housing this year are being used as guinea pigs for a process that seems very unlikely to succeed. •

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