Housing Selection

The other day, I mentioned to Celtic that I was in the process of picking my room and roommate. Earlier this evening, she left me this comment:

wait – you get to choose rooms and stuff? You’re going to know before you even leave for the summer? Huh? How does that work? Is it one of those schools where every single student lives in residence the whole entire time they’re a student there?

This sounds so incredibly odd to me.

If the process is confusing to her, it is undoubtedly confusing to others, too, so I will attempt to explain it here.


The process begins a few weeks ago, when everyone decides where they will be rooming next year. If you will be off campus, then you are done with the process. Those who wish to room in the row housing (townhouse style) submit their applications just before spring break, and choose rooms the week they get back. You choose the group you would like to room with, and each group gets a point total, based on the number of credits passed, the number of transfer, AP, and IB credits, and the number of semesters previously lived in the row housing or on campus. There is a big selection night, and the group with the highest total picks first, until all the rooms are filled. Anyone who didn’t fit, or anyone left over (if a group of 7 winds up with a room for 6) can go for singles there, and anyone left over at the end has about 2 days to fill out an application for the traditional halls (dorms). Again, points re awarded, 50 for coming back to the same hall the first year, and 25 for each additional year you come back, as well as 10 points for each semester lived in University owned housing, one point per credit passed, and per IB or AP credit, and half a point per transfer credit. It is heavily weighted to people who are returning to the same hall, and to upperclassmen living on campus. Tomorrow night is selection night. They go down the list of people in order of points, (which has been posted, along with a map of rooms that are available), and when your name is called, you and your roommate(s) choose a room. It is done by highest individual point total, not group total.

If you are going to be a Junior or above, you have the option to “squat”, which means that if you can find enough roommates to fill your room, you can keep it out of the general pool.

This leads to quite a bit of figuring how high you (or your roommate) are on the list, and who is going for triples, and who wants to room in which wing, and so on. Cean, my roommate, probably had quite a few AP credits, as he has 10 more points than I do. He is ranked 19, and the list starts at 6, (due to people wanting singles and squatters), and counting out triple contenders, we are ranked 8 or so. We have our eyes on a few rooms in particular in B wing, and would certainly like to be in 2B/C. It is rumored that Jake will be in that wing next year. He is my RA now, and I really like him. In honesty, though, it’s not that I dislike the other RA’s, just that I don’t know them very well.

So by this time tomorrow, I will know which room I am in next year, and will have signed a contract and meal plan. I think we have a good shot at one of the better rooms, but if everyone else is looking at one of the same rooms, then we’ll have to go somewhere else. Cean wants to go to another event that night, and has signed a letter to let me choose our room for the two of us. We’ve come to the conclusion that we’ll room somewhere in 2B/C, and that any room is okay with him. I’ll try and get one of the ones in B wing, because they are the modular rooms, and if that fails, one of the larger ones in C wing, where the desks are built in. This means that if you want to loft/bunk the beds, you need to build the loft yourself, which means that re-arranging the room later in the year is out.

On the off chance that someone is really interested in the process, the Office of Res. Life has a website devoted to explaining the details.


I started a post today in CS lab, while I was waiting for the professor to get a chance to verify that my code worked correctly, but about that time, she finally got there, and I only wrote a sentence or so. It turns out that the lab instructions were written for an older version of the program, and part of the lab involved selecting an option that was no longer on the “Tools” menu. She was trying to figure it out, but ended up giving up. She had done it successfully on the computer her office, but she must have had a different version. I eventually did figure it out, with a bit of experimenting, and some help from Google, but it didn’t matter anymore. Oh well, I showed her that I’m capable of figuring things out, I guess. You know, half of the computer stuff I learn is from Google. I don’t know what I would do without it.


Being a Catholic school, we get a 4 day weekend for Easter, which is next Sunday. Classes end at 4pm Thursday, and don’t resume until Tuesday. I’m going home for the weekend, but were I not, I’ve had 2 other invitations to Easter dinner, one specifically to me, and one blanket invitation. But I want to go home, and we’re having some company over there. Not that I have to go home, but that’s always nice, at least for a few days. I can see why some people are so anxious to get back, though.


I’d better get back to work, so that’s all for now.

–Nathan

2 thoughts on “Housing Selection

  1. that is the most bizarre res thing I’ve ever heard of – doesn’t it get all confusing and crazy and stuff with everyone fighting over rooms? Do you actually get to walk into the room you want, so you can see how it looks and know for sure what the size is, and whether it has modular furniture? Wouldn’t that piss people off, what with complete strangers in their room?

    Perhaps I should just go read that site you linked to. And it does make some sense, knowing where you’re going to be for the following year, so early, so you can find alternate accomodation. I didn’t find out if I even got into res until Late August, and we moved in Sept 2nd. It was nuts. I was so freaked out wondering what I’d do if I didn’t get in (or had a double *shudder*)

  2. Doesn’t seem like it would. The points thing is all figured out ahead of time, and so the person with higher points gets the room they want. Since Villa has only about 150 beds, and most of the rooms are just like each other, there’s not a whole lot of people in and out of rooms. And to be honest, I wouldn’t mind too much.

    You can see if the furniture is modular just by looking in the door, and if you know how it works, you know where B and C wings meet, and which rooms have what. All the A and B wing rooms,and almost every other room on campus have the modular furniture, all the C wing rooms are non-modular.

    I’ll find out for sure how it works, and which room I have in about two hours. I’ll post about how it went.

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