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I’m honestly not certain my son would have chosen to matriculate at MIT if he’d been randomly assigned to housing, instead of being able to choose his residence through the current system. He did have other really good choices in colleges that accepted him, and something as stupid as asssigning him to a random dorm would probably have knocked MIT down on the preference list.</p>
<p>Harvard’s good, thanks! 
I’m doing rotation research in a lab that does C. elegans neurobiology, so I’m learning some new techniques and working with a new model organism.</p>
<p>I’m traveling around the city quite a bit (my classes are near Fenway and the lab is at Mass General – I spend over an hour on the subway/bus/Tech Shuttle every day), and Adam’s working on his senior thesis… between school and wedding planning and cooking dinner together, our quality time is often spent falling asleep together on the couch while watching the evening news. (Yeah. You heard it. NON-STOP EXCITEMENT. :D)</p>
<p>mollie, I disagree that randomized housing is a bad thing. there’s way too much exclusivity among living groups, and in many cases students spend their time around a crippling lack of diversity. If there was randomized housing everybody would still be around a group of friends of their type, but there would also be balance. I for one am immensely bored hanging around any single living group (including my own) for more than a few days because people tend to be so homogeneous. The only concern is that without the specialization, there will not be critical mass for the very cool things, like groups of 3E types doing hacks and so forth; that with randomized housing none of the dormitories would be active at all. I not only don’t believe that this is a large issue, but I also think we would see interesting developments rise out of the diversity.
Also, maybe we would reshuffle and get some personality at simmons hall, which deserves it. I’m not diehard in support of randomized housing, but I definitely see the arguments for it.</p>
<p>Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree. I think randomized dorm assignments would destroy MIT dorm culture as we know it – there are many, many schools in this country which randomize dormitory selection, and I don’t belive many of them have identifiable cultures within their dormitories.</p>
<p>At any rate, I don’t think randomizing housing would actually increase diversity – students would still be friends with the people they with whom they would be friends anyway. The difference would be that those groups of friends would not live together. They would not have a home.</p>