Housing Guide 2008

It's that time of the year again -- students are choosing between friends, checking out old cutoff numbers, and strategizing in hopes of landing the ideal dorm room for the next year. Yep, it's the housing-selection season, and maybe with a little help from Spectator, you'll be ready.

It’s one thing to come to Columbia and join a campus group, but quite another to get quality housing out of it. Special Interest Communities range in tone from commune-like to scholarly, and the houses work with faculty advisers to explore passions from food to economics. The application processes closed in February, but be sure to watch for the many events each of these and other 2008-2009 SICs will be hosting next year.

What’s it like for a guy to live in an all-girls dorm? Marcos Garcia, CC ’08, spent a year in Barnard’s Plimpton Hall and lived to share the story.

The housing-selection process is about as easy to predict as the stock market, but where there are numbers, people will always use them.

If you thought the recent crackdown on parties in East Campus was bad, imagine living on campus 40 years ago.

Say goodbye to paper housing contracts. This year, Columbia Undergraduate Housing has inaugurated Protocol, a new room selection software product that completely removes the need for paper contracts in the room-selection process.

It’s Friday afternoon in the 116th Street subway station. A young face squeezes onto a packed 1 train among a crowd of gray-haired commuters in suits. As her fellow students lament the long trek back to East Campus from class, Amanda James, CC ’11, is setting off on a commute back to her Union Square apartment, where she lives with her family.

Since June 2007, when Columbia and Barnard joined eight other New York City colleges in adopting Mayor Bloomberg’s “30 in 10” challenge, ongoing efforts to make the University more eco-friendly have picked up speed. As part of the initiative, residence halls are going green.

While students are busy mulling over possible options in the perennial housing-selection process, administrators have their own annual housing ritual: renovations.

So you’re stuck in that crappy two-year limbo between cushy first-year housing and coveted senior selections. Imagine a life in...