<p>No, there are two draws that happen every spring. One is housing lottery and the second is room draw. You don’t have to enter the housing lottery if you don’t want to, you can opt to just stay in your current house, but everyone has to do room draw. </p>
<p>During room draw everyone is supposed to get a random lottery number and then you go in and pick your room in order of class seniority and then in order of lottery number. On paper, it’s very orderly, in practice it’s a chaotic mess. Also, Smith just switched to a computerized system for running housing draw and assigning lottery numbers and the program seems to have a lot of glitches (two years ago it assigned the rising seniors numbers in alphabetical order instead of randomly and all the numbers had to be re-done). </p>
<p>Adding to the frustration is that the housing office is probably the least transparent and accessible of all Smith houses. The housing coordinator almost never returns emails, and it is impossible to get a face-to-face appointment with her, particularly during room-draw/housing lottery time. </p>
<p>So basically there are often errors and hurt feelings that are compounded by poor administrative communication, and on top of that there’s the general fuss that not everyone can be satisfied every year. </p>
<p>I heard that last year was particularly bad with the number of admin errors and screw ups, but hopefully they’ll learn from their mistakes.</p>