The Emotional Cost of Living

For rising sophomores, the lottery is the ultimate evil. Students from Jackson and Elton are desperately seeking roommates to avoid Hudson street, or worse yet, summer housing. Suddenly the spacious singles and quads they had enjoyed have become the bane of their existence. Speaking as the proud occupant of a Jackson single, I can tell you now that the room is rapidly losing its appeal. Meanwhile, students from Little and North are doggedly guarding their low lottery numbers, carefully choosing their roommate and eagerly anticipating a nice large room in the center of campus and free from construction. Frobbans and the Jones folks have resigned themselves to rooms that won't be too different from those that they now occupy.

For the rising juniors, there seems to be significantly less concern. They have gone through this before and survived, and they all know that there is life after summer housing. Many are going abroad anyway and don't care too much about what room they have for one semester. For the rising seniors, this is all old hat. If they're not getting the room they want they're probablt living off campus anyway. Besides, it's their last year so they don't have to take future lotteries into consideration.

But beyond the simple matter of where you room lurks a much deeper problem: with whom do you room? This question has been the source of a grest deal of emotional distress around here. All of a sudden, best friends are questioning whether they can spend a year together in the same room. Are they too messy? Too neat? Too loud? Too quiet? A raging drunk? A teetotaling temperent? For the guys, it seems to be fairly simple: will this guy piss me off, and if he does, can I deal with it? If the answer is yes, then a room is formed. If the answer is no, then the guy tells him so and there are, for the most part, no hard feelings. Now, for the women, it seems to be a bit more complicated. Just as women tend to have higher standards for mates than men, they also tend to have higher standards for roommates. Every detail counts in this test. From mid-April on, every conversation has a hidden meaning and can entirely change the dynamics between potential roommies. A slip of the tongue can be disastrous, fueling the fire as triples and qauds mutate and shift.

But why is there all this animosity? Why does such an intrinsic part of the college process throw friendships to the side? Because the housing system sucks., that's why. It sucks long and hard and it doesn't stop. Besides the extensive knowledge of high level Calculus needed to understand the lottery numbers, the near-auction style dispensation of rooms is both demeaning and inefficient. I personally am not looking forward to waiting for hours on end in a roomful of teary-eyed freshman who didn't get the room they wanted with the people they wanted. I don't mind getting a bad room. I accept that. But I don't see why it should take me two hours and a mathematics degree to get it. And while no, I can't think of a better system myself, I'm not getting paid to do so. It doesn't seem to be half as bad as this at the schools of the friends that I've talked to. Why doesn't Trinity take a gander at some other systems and try them on for size, or at least open a forum to discuss it with the students? It's about time the administration here noticed how much we hate this system and took the time to figure out why and how they can fix it. Until then, you can find me waiting for the shuttle to pick me up and take me to school.