Do you want to live in that big single on the second floor on mid-Mass? Soon you can let ORL know exactly that.
Starting next term, students will be able to select the specific dorm room they want to live in when the Office of Residential Life switches to a "room draw" process for determining fall housing instead of the traditional computerized process.
Director of Housing Services Lynn Rosenblum explained that every student who is physically on campus this spring will participate in the new process, which will last about two weeks this coming May and will determine Fall term housing.
She said in most ways the new process is very similar to the one it is replacing.
As before, students will be randomly assigned numbers, with the seniors receiving the best slots and the sophomores receiving the most undesirable ones.
But instead of clicking buttons online to indicate their cluster preferences, room types, roommates and groups, students will physically go to a designated place on campus where they will see floor plans and choose the room they want most from what is available.
"I think it's going to be a lot of fun and students will be able to make choices with what's left when their priority number comes up," Rosenblum said.
Starting this spring, students who are off campus will be able to apply for housing for the Fall term in one of two ways. They can either authorize another student who will be on campus to act as a proxy for them during the selection process, or they can fill out a form and leave the decision up to the Residential Life staff as it had been in the past.
She said the main perk of the new program is that it will expand the choices that students at the College will get to make about their time here.
Rosenblum noted that students have been requesting a different housing selection process for a long time, but the change has been put off because of Dartmouth's unique quarter system.
"It's something that we've wanted to do for a long time, but we've always sort of put it aside because of the D-plan," Rosenblum said.
She explained that most other colleges and universities use the room draw processes, but they also have about 99 percent of their student bodies on campus in the spring term. But at Dartmouth, a significant body of students are on Foreign Study Programs during the spring, making the room draw process more difficult to execute.
Rosenblum said all active students will receive a letter by March that will inform them about the new process.
She also reported that before the actual room draw, the residence hall blueprints will be posted online so that students can mull over their options before they go to make their final decisions.
Rosenblum said the new process will only replace the existing process for the spring-to-fall housing selection process because during the other terms, only random rooms free up around campus and choices are not as possible.
