Following last year’s debacle with housing selection, where many students were left either frustrated with their placement or without any housing at all, the housing selection process this year was approached by many students with a sense of apprehension.
“Last year it went really badly and a lot of people were afraid it was going to be the same this year,” Abby Briese ’27 said in an interview with The Olaf Messenger.
Overall, the process seems to have gone much more smoothly this time around, especially for students looking to live in group-style housing, such as Ytterboe pods and New Hall quad-suites.
Like many others, Briese entered the housing process hoping to select an Ytterboe dectet. At the last minute, however, her group was down to only nine people.
“Dean Medley saved us,” Briese said, explaining how Associate Dean of Students for Residence Life Christopher Medley had helped complete her group’s dectet, making it possible for them to select their desired pod in the allotted time frame.
This is not to say, however, that there were no unhappy customers at this year’s bid for housing. Rumblings around campus suggest that the allocation of townhouses did not go as smoothly as planned. One source, who prefers to remain anonymous, described the situation as a “trainwreck.”
Going into the housing bid, seven of the townhouses were up for grabs. For those groups with the first seven housing selection times, the assumption was that they were guaranteed a spot in a townhouse, should they want it.
The process through the housing portal is not foolproof, however. Several of these groups with the first few time slots reported that the website crashed right when it was their turn to select a room. As a result, their time came and went, and they were unable to select a townhouse. By the time these students were able to access the portal again, the townhouses — which they had been guaranteed coming into the process — had been selected by groups with later time slots.
A week-long controversy ensued as student groups and Dean Medley worked together to sort out the technological mishap and make sure everyone involved in the situation was allocated housing for next year. Ultimately, groups with later times who had selected a townhouse were told that they would not be able to live in their selected housing, and were offered priority housing in New Hall. On the flip side, student groups with those first seven time slots were manually placed in townhouses, where they should have been in the first place.
