Residential Life
Effort to expedite ResLife housing assignment process results in elimination of Round 3 petitions
Residential Life has elected to eliminate Round 3 of housing petitions effective immediately and will instead accept both apartment and suite petitions during Round 2.
The decision to consolidate the apartment and suite petitions into one round does not affect lottery numbers, nor does it affect the petition process. Rather, students who are interested in living in apartments will participate in Round 2, as will students interested in living in suites, and both petition processes will happen at the same time.
The decision to combine Round 2 and Round 3 came after a group of students and staff—who meet every year to review the housing selection process and propose changes—decided that combining the two rounds would help make the process more efficient, as most students are set on either an apartment or a suite when petitioning.
While any alteration in the housing assignment process may be disconcerting for some students, little, if anything, has actually changed.
Tim Lempfert, director of housing operations, explained that the elimination of Round 3 was meant solely to expedite the housing assignment process.
“Really the reason we did that was in an effort to complete our housing selection rounds earlier in hopes to have more housing assignments for next year done earlier in the semester,” Lempfert said.
Freshman Rachel Nassau acknowledged the reasoning for the change and noted that it will most likely not cause any trouble moving forward.
“I don’t really know much about the housing process, but I don’t really think that it will make much of a difference for me,” Nassau said.
Freshman Lauren Schaffer echoed Nassau’s sentiments, saying that because she planned to participate in Round 1, in which students living in a Residential College can petition to live in that Residential College, the change was unlikely to affect her.
The change was first considered, in part, after ResLife noticed a pattern in the types of petitions submitted during Round 2 and Round 3.
“Our experience has shown that the vast majority of our students are specifically interested in one or the other and so our hope was that we could streamline that process so that students are petitioning for what it is they specifically want to, where they specifically want to live, in that Round 2,” Lempfert said.
For those students concerned that, if rejected from Round 2, they will no longer have a Round 3 to fallback on, Lempfert said Residential Life still guarantees housing for all students who continue to choose to live within their system.
Special housing accommodations will also remain unaffected by the change, as Lempfert explained.
“Special housing accommodations process is part of the very first set of housing assignments that we do, so we want to make sure that we’re taking care of those and assigning those right early in the process,” Lempfert said.