Students rushed to housing front desks on Friday to view the Draw results for the 2010-2011 school year, which were posted a day early. This marks the second year of the new three-tiered Housing Master Plan.
The new system sought to “uncrowd” the residences and return spaces back to the numbers they were designed to hold–triples were reverted to doubles and doubles reverted to singles. Student Housing also expanded students’ ability to rank all residences by allowing them to rank the type of room within each residence.
“The statistics aren’t in yet, since the Draw has just been completed,” wrote Rodger Whitney, executive director of Housing, in an e-mail to The Daily on Sunday. “Early indications are that this new level of selection priority is allowing students to rank their housing choices based more on where they would really like to live than on where they think they will have a good chance of getting a premier assignment in the in-house draw.”
Cutoff numbers were posted to Housing’s website as of Sunday.
Whitney commented on the impact the ranking change has had on the popularity of houses. As usual, the Row was extremely popular, and most houses were filled with tier one applicants.
Whitney also noted the increase in popularity for co-ops. Most filled with either tier one or tier two.
“Toyon and Branner were also popular again this year,” Whitney said.
The new system assigned 4,005 students, or 98 percent of applicants, up approximately 1.9 percent from last year. Despite an increase in housing applications, there has been a decrease in the number of students with guaranteed housing who were not assigned, from 89 in 2009 to 48 this year–the lowest since 2006.
“One in three students received their first choice in the Draw this year,” Whitney said. “This is up from last year. Of the 173 total choices which each person could rank, 52 percent of all students received one of their first 10 choices.”
Whitney said Housing is working toward a system that would allow students to select their specific rooms online in real time.
“We do not yet have the technical system in place to implement this plan, but are working toward it,” he said. “With this ‘self-select model,’ students will be assigned a gate time based on their draw number…and will select from available assignments during that time slot. This will give residents even more control, and eliminate the need to rank housing choices online.”
“I’m very pleased with the Draw results,” said Calvin Fernandez ’13. “I thought the Draw was very fair, and I think that it turned out in everybody’s best interest.”
“Forming draw groups caused a lot of drama within our dorm,” said fellow draw group member Olivia Isaac ’13. “I remember wishing it was random, because I hated choosing between all my friends. But now that it’s all resolved, I’m really happy with the result, but that could be due to the fact that I got my first-choice housing.”
Still, she added, “it would have been nice if we could just use the sorting hat from Harry Potter and avoid all this.”
For others, the Draw situation did not end well.
“My draw number was 1,817, so I feel like I kind of got screwed,” said Eli Hart ’13. “I talk to people who drew 1,100 or lower and got their first choice, whereas I got my 15th choice for housing. So most of my friends are living in Toyon or Branner, and I was put over in Lagunita, which I’m sure is still a nice place to live, but it’s not the location I wanted.”
Others had a fairytale Draw story come true.
“We were ecstatic,” said Sherry Ho ’11. Ho used tier one and drew number 11, which secured her and her draw group spots in Xanadu next year. “We were all really nervous about the Draw in the weeks leading up, but we just got lucky.”