Looking at Room Selection
Room selection is war. It is an all-out battle between groups of friends; groups of frenemies; and of course, the people who just want to live in a specific dorm. “What? You forgot to fill out your housing form?!” shouts Random Student A. “You forgot to select the room we wanted?!” yells Random Student B. In the end, only the strongest friendships will survive… and get their preferred housing selection.
In all seriousness, let’s talk about room selection, which is surprisingly high stakes. If you’re trying to live with a group of friends and one of them either misses a step or mis-selects a room, your plan is basically ruined. I’ve been fortunate enough to only ever have one housing issue come up, but I do know quite a few people who’ve had some pretty unfortunate issues.
There’s also the randomness to it. If you get a late selection time, there’s not really much else that can be done besides hope that there’s a slot in the building you want.
That being said, I really can’t see a way that the process could improve besides even more reminders to sign up. While you certainly can get really messed up with getting a poor room selection time, randomness makes a lot of sense. If you were to open every room to every student at the exact same time, that would most certainly lead to both chaos and a server crash.
In addition, while missing a housing deadline is brutal, there really isn’t a way to fix it that is fair to other students. If you hold rooms for people who are late for housing, that’s just taking away from the people who do it on time. If you extend the due date, then that doesn’t give enough prep-time for the housing staff.
To sum it all up, housing selection is a necessary evil. Will there be issues? Definitely—and unfortunately, it can be tough. However, there really aren’t many alternatives.
