The room selection process is stressful. There’s a lot at stake and yet, as students, we have surprisingly little control over the situation. For starters, you are assigned a completely random lottery number that determine your residential fate for the following year.
The process only worsens when you are corralled into the basement of Compton Hall to await your rooming destiny, and time literally seems to stand still.† Dorm floor plans surround you on all sides while you stand amongst your peers and rooming competition, hoping your name gets called before theirs.
People around you are in a frenzy, upset because their top choices are already gone, and now are faced with the challenge of choosing a whole new set of potentials. Amidst the chaos, you start second-guessing where you initially thought you wanted to live for no reason other than to work off some of your own nerves. Compromises begin to be made because you are getting desperate to just have a room and be done with it ó who really needs windows or closets anyway? Suddenly, you can justify living anywhere in any room on campus, as long as you can call it your own.
I sat in the midst of this bedlam with my roommate by my side. For the most part, we held it together and tried not to be distracted by all the commotion around us.† We knew, or at least thought, we would leave there that night with a room, maybe not our dream room, but a room nonetheless. That was where we were wrong.† Residence Life miscalculated, and a combination of overcompensating for the incoming class of first-years, inaccurately accommodating the gender distribution of the returning classes, and underestimating the size of the graduating class left 24 girls dormless ó they had exhausted the available female housing options on campus.
I can appreciate the difficulties that accompany residentially accommodating an entire college student community. Yet at the same time, a miscalculation of this magnitude seems excessive, even borderline irresponsible. The number of returning students for the subsequent year should be no huge surprise to Residence Life, and therefore allocating the appropriate amount of space on campus should be a more accurate science.† It’s frustrating to be faced with this dilemma, and yet even more exasperating to be told that this has happened before.† Why didn’t we know that this was a possibility? Shouldn’t they have been able to see this coming? Furthermore, Res. Life attempts to placate our nerves by assuring us that we are on a room waitlist and that they are doing everything they can to find us rooms; yet where are these rooms they are trying to find? Last time I checked, rooms don’t start appearing simply because they are needed.
My roommate and I spent a fair amount of time picking which rooms on campus we were interested in, weighing the pros and cons of certain dorms, their locations and size, certain floors, etc. That planning was unnecessary though, because now we are left to see where Res. Life will be able to fit us on campus. A process that was already incredibly unpredictable became even more ambiguous for the girls who found themselves without rooms. What little control we had initally, completely disappeared.
Emily Timmerman is a contributor to the Voice. She can be reached for comment at ETimmerman13@wooster.edu