As the current school year begins to wind down, the Office of Residential Life's has initiated the yearly process of allotting residences to the student body. Rising sophomores, juniors and seniors who stay on campus will be choosing their homes for the next year at the liberty of the office's and dorm-specific policies.
The lottery-based order for room picks remains constant across all dorms. Each student is assigned a lottery number which reflects their priority in the line to select rooms. The method for how these numbers are assigned is where the room pick process starts to diverge between individual dorms.
Trey Cotey, a resident of Dunne Hall, stated that “[Residential Life] randomly assigns picks for each grade level — seniors first, then juniors, sophomores and freshmen.”
Badin Hall resident, Mary Sullivan, similarly described this method of receiving assigned numbers, saying that residents would “do room picks going down the list.”
However, this method is not the only way that dorms assign room pick numbers. Sophomore Abigail Culcasi said that her dorm, Pasquerilla West Hall, uses a physical lottery ball machine to give residents their order of room selection. After spinning the handle of the machine to receive a ball, the resident is assigned whatever number the ball is labeled.
One of the more noticeable differences between dorm room pick policies are how to stake a final claim on a room.
“You go to a room at 5 p.m. and line up in number order, telling the AR which room you want,” Culcasi said when describing Pasquerilla West Hall's method. The rooms, projected on a screen to show students what is still available, get crossed off as they are claimed.
For Grace Schager, a resident of Pasquerilla East Hall, the final room pick procedure was entirely digital. "You get a 30 minute window on a Google Sheets once your time starts,” she said.
Aside from the final moment of room selection, a large part of the picking process is deciding on a desirable room configuration. With many juniors going abroad, different halls having a wide variety of available room options. In addition, figuring out which friends would live best together is an added stress factor for students.
“Seniors take a lot of singles,” Cotey said when regarding the Dunne Hall residents. Cotey stated that while many juniors want singles, there are not enough of these rooms available and thus leaves the residents to lean toward quads.
According to Schager, this tendency for choosing quads extends to Pasquerilla West Hall. As a rising junior, Schager had the third overall pick among the residence hall’s sophomore residents, and she and her roommates opted to choose the exact same quad that they lived in during the current school year.
