Hi, junior Reedies! We’ve heard that some of you are anxious about your chances of getting a room on campus for next academic year, so we wanted to try to help dispel a few of the myths that seem to be circulating and help you feel better informed about the room selection process. Here’s the senior lottery change that we made:
*Before this year, seniors received two lottery numbers and could participate in both the senior and general lottery. This year we have consolidated the process and given seniors one lottery time slot during which they can view senior and general lottery rooms all at the same time. Non-senior students will only be able to view general lottery rooms.
And here are a few facts and numbers about senior housing on campus:
*Seniors are now able to see all senior and general lottery rooms at the same time, thus allowing them to make a more informed housing decision and not gamble on which of their lottery numbers is better. This is a change from the old process, in which once a senior selected a room in the senior lottery they wouldn’t be able to see which general rooms would have been available to them.
*The same number of senior rooms are set aside for seniors this year as there have been in past years – over 1/3 of the rooms in the general lottery are reserved for seniors only. Seniors still have the same chances of securing a room as they have in the past.
* Based on numbers from the current lottery, we have enough senior rooms set aside to accommodate about 80% of the seniors who signed up for the lottery. The remaining 20% will have a shot at securing a room in the general lottery. These are much better odds than the rising sophomores or juniors have.
* Our new housing lottery system does not support the function of one student having two lottery numbers. This solution seemed like the best fix to retain seniors’ priority access to rooms while streamlining and simplifying our process.
*Seniors have never been guaranteed housing. Their ability to secure housing has always depended on their lottery time slot and the number of seniors who sign up for the lottery. There have been seniors who have been unable to select rooms in both the senior and general lotteries in past years.
* There are almost 400 students who are rising seniors – if we reserved rooms for seniors the way we do for incoming students, there would be fewer than 100 on-campus beds for the sophomore and junior classes combined.
* Students who are unable to select a room in the lottery will be able to add themselves to the waitlist after the lottery concludes. The waitlist will be organized by cohort number, so if you’re one of the first students to try to select a room after we’ve run out, you’ll be one of the first students to be offered a room. In the past three years we’ve been able to offer a space to everyone on the waitlist before the next academic year begins.
Hope this info helps clear up some of the confusion. Please let us know if you have any questions and best of luck with room selection!
