Months of Work, and a Lottery Number Is Born

For students entering the annual housing lottery, the most important day of the year was Tuesday, March 23, when the all-important lottery numbers were posted. But in the housing office in 125 Wallach, this week's lottery number assignments were just another step in a process that began months ago.

By the time students began online registration for the lottery earlier this month, the staff of Housing and Dining had logged thousands of hours working behind the scenes to prepare for room selection, according to Erik Gibson, manager of room assignments. (Gibson replaced Jay Orenduff this year as the public face of the housing lottery and the overseer of the room selection process.)

Nobody in Gibson's office seems to quite recall just how early the preliminary meetings began. But by January, Gibson said, he and his colleagues were hard at work preparing for this year's housing lottery.

Much of this preparatory work has remained invisible to students. In recent years, the room selection process has become increasingly computerized and Web-based. Gone are the days of lining up in John Jay to physically pick numbers out of a box. But don't let the electronic façade fool you: from registration to contract-signing, room selection is far from automated.

Preparing for the March registration period, according to Gibson, entails compiling a list of eligible students and their class standing. The theory sounds simple enough--but the reality is far from it.

Compiling an accurate list of students eligible to register for the lottery requires first figuring out, to the extent possible, which students will be living in special interest housing, the Living Learning Center, brownstones, and RA suites.

"All this stuff is supposed to be done prior to the lottery," Gibson said.

Another major responsibility of the housing office is handling special cases such as students who have studied abroad or taken leaves of absence.

In the end, the seemingly innocuous task of determining who is eligible to enter the lottery--and what their point value should be--becomes a labor-intensive project. Because each student's situation is potentially unique, the list is manually compiled and tailored in spreadsheets, databases, and the occasional notepad.

Once registration begins, much of the room selection process is in the hands of specialized computer software designed by the housing office's own Ben Turner. Turner's software powers the registration process, the assignment of lottery numbers, and the Web site used for general selection beginning last year, among other things. (Group suite selection will continue to be conducted the old-fashioned way in John Jay Lounge "for the foreseeable future," according to Gibson.)

The mysterious assignment of random lottery numbers has been the subject of much speculation among students. But the reality, according to Gibson and Turner, is relatively unglamorous: at the push of a button, a computer program assigns to each group a unique random number between 1 and 3,000, and the group's fate is sealed.

Gibson's staff put in some of their longest hours in the week of the lottery number assignment: Gibson said he has spent many nights in the office until around midnight this week, addressing a veritable plethora of student complaints and problems.

This year, Gibson said, the number of issues that arose far outnumbered years past. Many students failed to register in advance of the deadline. Many more students registered incorrectly or misunderstood the instructions on the Web site. A few students even discovered they were listed with the wrong class standing. (Ever seen "10 pts" next to your name when you were expecting "30 pts"?)

To anyone who has tried to contact the housing office this week, the unusual number of lottery-related problems was obvious. All week, the office was full of students waiting to plead their cases to Gibson or to Rob Lutomski, assistant director of housing. At one point, Gibson received so many voicemails from students that his phone stopped accepting further messages.

Why the unprecedented exception-handling workload this year? Gibson said he's "not really sure."

"The thing is," Turner said, "It's the identical system as last year."

For Gibson's staff, the work is far from over. Group Suite Selection begins today, sending the housing staff and many seniors to the good old bulletin boards in John Jay Lounge. Because group selection is still done by hand--rather than over the Web--every student's housing contract must be keyed into computers by hand.

Once students have picked their housing, their selections--and the information on their housing contract--must be entered into Columbia's mainframe computer system, the Student Information System, the same system that tracks grades, class registration, financial accounts, and other records. Turner and Gibson said they have not yet figured out a way to automate this process.

"Basically, when we go from SIS to Access [the database system used internally by the housing office] or vice versa, it involves one of us sitting there, typing, fixing little problems," Gibson said.

So while students are pouring through lists of lottery numbers trying to anticipate their chances of securing their dream housing--or at least their chances of avoiding Wien--the long hours will continue for Lutomski, Gibson, Turner, and others. And if there's a problem with your housing registration, take a number--because this is the busiest time of year in 125 Wallach, and it'll probably stay that way for weeks to come.