While all juniors and seniors who requested on-campus housing received it, a little over 100 members of the Class of 2010 are on the waitlist for rooms after last week's lottery, according to Director of Residential Life and Learning Yolanda King.
Waitlisted freshmen will have to wait until at least April 1 to hear from the Office of Residential Life and Learning (ORLL) about their room assignments. Even then, there is no guarantee that that they will be paired with their roommates of choice.
Freshman Jose Soto-Mendez and his proposed roommate for next year are currently waitlisted. "We just have to wait. They said that they were going to try to provide choices for us," Soto said. "The problem is that we're not guaranteed to have the same roommates that we wanted."
King said that it is not unusual for rising sophomores to be on the waitlist and that they will all get housing.
"[All] sophomores are guaranteed on-campus housing, and we will work with students who are seeking to live together as roommates based on what we will have available," she said in an e-mail to the Daily.
Although all members of the classes of 2007, 2008 and 2009 had the opportunity to get singles in the lottery as rising sophomores if they had good enough numbers, this year there were none available for current freshmen to choose from.
King told the Daily that this year's waitlist was higher than last year's, although she said she did not know about earlier years.
Even so, she said that the lottery went smoothly. "Overall, the lottery went very well this year," she said.
Some students agreed. Freshman Nick Welch successfully obtained a double and said that he and his roommate for next year were happy with the lottery. "I think it's fair. I can't think of anything that needs to be changed, and we're happy with the room we got."
But many students begged to differ. "They shouldn't need a waiting list," said freshman Jonah Gold, who is currently on the waitlist. "For the amount of money that we pay, it is unreasonable for our school not to be able to supply housing to all of its students without all of these difficulties."
Gold said that the waitlist is antithetical to the concept of guaranteed housing for freshmen and sophomores. "Guaranteed housing should mean that there are enough rooms in the lottery for everyone," he said.
Other students were concerned with broader issues. Although King said that around 200 students attended information sessions about the housing process and that information available online, many students felt that the ORLL did not adequately prepare them for the process.
"I felt very unprepared by ResLife's information," freshman Lauren Visek said. Although she got a room, she said that the lottery was confusing. "When I got to the lottery, I had no idea what I was going to get," she said.
Freshman Andrew Vincent agreed. "There's only so much you can learn from ResLife. They don't give you specific information about how [the housing process] is going to work," he said.
Also notable this year was the popularity of Wren Hall, whose newly designated friendship suites were distributed in an application process that preceded the lottery. "We originally set 16 10-person suites aside for those who applied. When the deadline arrived for the applications we received over 43," King said.
In order to accommodate students' preferences, the ORLL re-coordinated their plans for the building and provided five more suites. King called Wren a "highlight" of this year's housing lottery.
While numbers are available for Wren, King said that exact figures for how many students participated in the lottery and how many people are still without housing have not yet been released.
-Giovanni Russonello and Pranai Cheroo contributed reporting to this article.
