Today’s Daily Deac is all about housing selection and some things students should know. While the housing selection tabling might be particularly relevant to P’28s (since their students have not gone through housing selection before), the advice to be kind to your roommate group applies to all!
Housing Selection tabling next week
This might be especially relevant for P’28s, as well as families of other students who have not gone through housing selection themselves: I’m thinking of students who had been added to their Greek block as rising sophomores (and didn’t have to pick their own rooms), but are now rising juniors who need to select.
Next week Residence Life and Housing is hosting “Cookies and Conversations” March 25-27. I would strongly encourage our ‘28s and first-time room selection students to attend. This will be an opportunity to not only understand the mechanics of the process in advance, but also an opportunity to mingle with other students who may be looking to form a roommate group. There will also be a Housing Selection information tabling session on Tuesday, April 8.
Be kind to your roommate group
As they think about housing selection, students should be considering things like ‘should I live with my best friend, or do I need some separation between my living space and my social space?‘ and ‘do I have a plan A, B, and Cin case the building/roommate group I wanted doesn’t pan out as planned?’ But they should also be thinking about their roommate/roommate group and how to handle the unexpected. What do I mean by this?
I always encourage students to have frank, transparent discussions with their proposed roommate groups in advance of housing selection, so you avoid the situation where one person suddenly finds a single open and they grab it, or gets an offer to be pulled into another group in what they perceive is a more desirable building, leaving the other 3 people in their roommate group in the lurch. That causes all kinds of hurt feelings and can have a domino effect of busting up roommate groups students thought were previously agreed upon and were solid.
So encourage your students to have a gentleperson’s discussion/agreement about whether they will all stick together as a roommate group – even if someone gets a better offer, etc. It is much easier to talk about that upfront than deal with hurt feelings on the back end.
