By Brian Shoener
Contributing Writer
Housing. For most of you, it will all be over by the time you read this. As I write this, people are fretting about where they will live, whom they will live with (or near) and if they even have the chance of getting the room of their dreams.
Of course this anxiety rises out of the entirely random lottery numbers. What I would truly love to know is why the lottery numbers are random. There are quite a few factors that could be used to determine students’ lottery numbers.
I have talked to others about this, and most of us feel that an appropriate way to determine lottery number would be by basing on students’ GPA. So many people here work as hard as then can, keeping their eyes on the goal of a financially secure future. Why should they have to suffer and worry about where they will live?
They should at least get this small break for their diligence. I’m sure some people would get shortchanged (if they have a bad semester, for example), but I feel that in general, things would work out well.
My other problem with housing is the way rooms are partitioned. I understand and support co-ed floors, but I don’t get why rooms must have a gender assigned to them. This is the 21st century; there must be some way to make it so that a certain number of men and women are on a given floor without predetermining what gender can go in which room.
I had to pick a bad room on the hall I was blocking on because there was only one more “male” room. None of the better female rooms were taken yet, but I couldn’t choose them.
I have very little knowledge of computer programming, but I can’t imagine that it would be difficult to write something to regulate how many of each respective gender is on each hall. The partitioning might be so that everyone has an equal chance to get a good room, but I need a clearly defined reason before I can go along with it.
With these two relatively simple changes, housing could be much less stressful than the chaotic mess it currently is.
One reply on “Housing lottery system needs reform”
Really? So with your GPA system, all the engineering/math/science majors would get worse picks than the sociology/econ/education majors… I don’t think people would be too happy about that.