Get A Room From Your Room

With Barnard College housing selection approaching in just over a month, the Office of Residential Life and Housing should take a closer look at its outdated selection procedures. Room selection is a critical determinant of students’ happiness, but the paper process currently in place leaves much to be desired. ResLife should stagger room selection over a longer time period and make the entire system electronic. These simple measures would streamline what is often a frustrating process.

This year, Barnard housing selection will take place between March 27 and April 1. Senior selection occurs first, covering students with expected graduation dates during the 2008-2009 academic year. At the start of the following week, the rest of the student body selects housing during Suite and General Selection. The entire process is on paper—students report to the James Room, on the fourth floor of Barnard Hall, to look at floor plans on posterboards and sign up for their rooms manually. Students typically wait on long lines as ResLife employees communicate with each other via walkie-talkie. Coupled with the condensed time frame, this archaic methodology makes it impossible for students to predict which rooms will be chosen at any given stage of the process. It is difficult, as a result, for students to plan ahead, especially for Suite Selection.

Two changes to the housing selection system could remedy these inefficiencies. First, Barnard should make housing selection fully electronic. By doing so, it would follow the example of the college’s Office of the Registrar, which earlier this year put sign-up for limited-enrollment courses online. ResLife should provide real-time updates of online floor plans throughout the course of housing selection. Online registration would eliminate the need for proxies and allocate housing space more seamlessly. Moreover, software of this kind already exists—the technology that Columbia uses during General Selection details which rooms have been chosen and which are still available. Second, Barnard should stagger the registration process for the housing lottery for each of the three types of selection, as the Editorial Board recommended to Columbia in yesterday’s editorial. Seniors should still choose first, but Suite and General Selection should be spaced out over a longer period. Since group size limits the rooms that students can select, everyone should have ample time to examine the rooms still available on electronic floor plans before deciding how best to proceed.

Housing selection at Barnard is due for reform. Although it is too late for this year’s process to be overhauled, ResLife should upgrade its technology over the coming year in preparation for room selection in the spring of 2009. It should aim to have an online selection process in place by next March, allowing students to go through room selection conveniently from their own rooms.