Each year there are certain things we in residence life we
can expect for our new students (those who have not lived on campus before). Roommate questions, can I bring a car if I am a new student, how
far are my classes from my hall, and the very real issue of where will I be
living. Each fall these questions are asked by a few new incoming students, but
as the spring semester gets going, the questions become more and more common.
To help everyone understand our room process, I want to share some details and
help everyone know what to expect between now and the fall semester.
Housing assignments are made based on a date driven process.
Simply put, the sooner you turned in your housing contract and housing deposit,
the better chance you have to get into the hall you prefer. Please note, we
don’t guarantee specific spaces to anyone! We do our best to honor preferences,
but the volume of people who want to live on campus prevents this. Based upon
numbers from 1/12/13 we have 188 students with housing contracts that were
received by our priority date of December 1 who have Towers North as their
first hall preference. There are about 260 beds in Towers North, so people with
contracts after December 1 have a lower probability for getting Towers North
than someone with a November contract date. As of December 1, there were almost
500 students with an active housing contract. This does not mean we have run
out of space for people, but merely demonstrates that people start signing up
for on campus living early. Sometimes a student or parent will say to me in
March or April that they thought they were still early in the process, I have
to share the unfortunate news that by March/April there are well over a 1,000
students with active housing contracts ahead of them. For comparison purposes, the
first housing contract was received on October 1, 2012 for next fall.
We begin in the middle of the spring semester allowing
students with early contact dates, meaning PRIOR
to December 1, to start selecting their rooms online. If you have ever booked
an airline ticket online or seen how you can change your seat when you check in
at an airport, you this gives you some idea about our process. You have the
ability to pull in your roommate when you choose your hall and room. So if you
turned in your housing contact in November, which hundreds did, then you could
go online (we’ll be sending you the instructions on how to do this) and you
select your room in the hall you prefer and then also select your roommate by
adding their name into the other bed(s) for that room. Please note, we allow
students to preference their room and roommate. We do not permit students to
choose suitemates, next door neighbors, or other assignment choices. For
example, each year there is at least one request that someone want’s their best
friend in a room on the same floor, but not their room. Your ability to
preference your hall, room, and roommate are specific to you and cannot be used
to place students in other rooms. Sorry! I know sometimes people want to pre-position
friends around the floors, but I strongly believe part of college is about meeting
new people and our assignment process helps facilitate this. I will blog later
about the danger of selecting your best friend as a roommate!
After we go through the self-assign process for students who
submitted their contacts early, we then begin making room assignments for all
students. In general, a majority of students have their room and roommate
assignment made by the university, so if you did not turn in your contact early
or you don’t know who your roommate is, DON’T PANIC. You are in the
majority! We look at your building and roommate preference information and then
try to match you with someone similar, but not identical, to you. This is why
it is critical that you be honest with your roommate preference questions. If
you are a slob, own it. Don’t claim you are a neat freak and then hope by
having a neat roommate you will become a cleaner person. You just might be at the
beginning of a roommate conflict! Don’t use your new roommate as your tutor or
life coach, they have their own problems and expecting to find a roommate who
exercises to help get you in shape is a terrible way to start off as roommates.
In the end, we know where you live matters… but what matters
MORE is who you live with. I will
talk about that in the coming weeks.
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