Res Life: No singles for sophomores

Julianne Herts Assistant News Editor

Room draw procedure will be unusual this spring due to the closing of Davison House and its 191 residents that will be displaced.

Director of Residential Life Luis Inoa explained that the new room draw procedure was designed with a collaboration of students and administrators. “It was a collaborative effort between the Office of Residential Life and the Residential Life Advisory Committee,” said Inoa. “In the end, not much has changed from what we did last year. Some key differences are the Davison House Draw. “

The House Draw plan was designed to allow Davison residents to select their new dorms. The plan calls for a list of the number of rooms available in each house to be posted in Davison on April 4.

Davison residents will receive a house draw number, and on April 11 Davison students will choose which house to live in based on draw number and seniority. Rising sophomores will draw with their future roommates.

The rest of room draw procedure is no different than it has been in recent years. On April 14, non-Davison students who have requested to switch houses will be notified about whether they will be allowed to move, and randomly generated room draw numbers will be posted in each house, along with a floor plan. First, seniors and juniors will draw based on their draw numbers. Then sophomores will draw in order of their draw numbers, often pulling a roommate (who must be from the same house) into the new room along with them.

Though the general room draw process has not changed, students’ options during room draw will be more limited than usual this year.

“We also reduced the number of suites involved in suite draw to just the three- and four-person suites in Main and Jewett Houses,” said Inoa. “I will also not be sending out the room draw list more than twice. We will need to think about the process for filling Davison for next year.”

Most rising sophomores will draw into doubles, unlike in previous years when sophomores were likely to draw into singles. Additionally, several single rooms will be transformed into double rooms for next year, and some double rooms will be converted into triples.

Though rooms will be more crowded, non-Davison residents may benefit from one aspect of the policy change. In the past few years, first priority was granted to students who were already residents of the house that they were drawing rooms in, while students who had switched dormitories were the last in their class to choose a room. This year, however, all of the current Davison residents will be moving into a new house, so there will be no penalty for switching houses. Students who have lived in one dorm for years will have no advantage over students who just moved in from a different dorm.

“It seems like it is giving people who want to switch [houses] a nice advantage,” said Annika Bastacky ’10. She noted that the policy change has the unintended consequence of making it easier to draw into a nice room in a new house, whether or not a student’s old house was Davison.

To counter-act the influx of students into each dormitory, additional senior housing will be built. In addition to the existing Town Houses (THs), Terrace Apartments and South Commons, which currently hold 541 upper-classmen, six new five-person THs and two 10-person co-ops that will soon be
under construction.

Though College officials had hoped that new THs would be ready by beginning of the Fall 2008 semester, the buildings will not be completed until late October or early November. Construction cannot begin until the Town Board of Poughkeepsie grants its approval and issues building permits.

The Town Board’s review process has been delayed, however, while the College attempts to answer the questions of a team of engineers hired by the Town Board to oversee building projects.

At the Vassar Student Association (VSA) Council meeting on Sunday, Feb. 24, Master Planning Committee Member Andrew Bennett ’09 noted that the College was pursuing an alternative housing plan.

“We reserved a block of 24 rooms at the Days Inn,” he said. “Each room has two beds, and this could serve to alleviate pressures on housing, since these THs likely won’t be completed on time. During the renovation of Lower Fulton Dormitory last year, Marist College housed many freshmen and sophomores in a nearby Marriott Residence Inn.

Even though the new THs will probably not be ready for Fall 2008, they will probably be an option for the spring. How students will draw into them has not yet been determined.