Sophomore Housing

Marian
Sat, 13 Sep 2008 09:55:30 +0000

Sophomore parent here.

Your freshman, and every other freshman, is in a difficult situation because the lottery comes late and off-campus housing in good locations is usually rented early. But there’s also another thing to think about: going Greek.

Your daughter should consider whether or not there is any chance that she may want to join a sorority. If she does join one, she would almost certainly be expected to live in the sorority house as a sophomore. Therefore, signing an apartment lease in the fall is a bad idea for people who have any interest in Greek life. Sorority (and fraternity) rush doesn’t take place until just before classes start in the second semester.

Most sophomores who don’t go Greek do go into the housing lottery, mostly because in October or November, they hadn’t yet established a group of friends whom they would want to rent an apartment with. Also, a lot of people want to live in the West Campus houses, which are exceedingly popular with sophomores. As a sophomore, your daughter is guaranteed housing. What she is not guaranteed is that she can live with her friends, even if they form a blocking group together (blocking groups may have to break up if groups of adjacent rooms are no longer available). Your daughter could end up in a different dorm from her friends. She could end up having to share a room with a stranger. She could even end up in a program house that she didn’t intend to join, if that house happens to have extra rooms available. (Leftover rooms in program houses are included in the lottery and are often the last rooms to be taken.) These things are not disasters, however. They happen to sophomores every year, and everybody manages to survive.

My daughter got a terrible lottery time slot. She wanted West Campus, and she wanted a single, but all the rooms in West Campus were gone by that time, and the only singles available were in Ujamaa, which did not appeal to her. She ended up living in a double in Cascadilla with a random roommate (who turned out to be nice, as it happens), while most of her friends ended up in various West Campus houses. But she and her friends still do things together, and my daughter can even eat with her friends in the West Campus dining halls if she wants to. (Oddly, it’s the people in the good dorms who have the restrictive dining plan; everybody else has lots of dining options, including signing up for no dining plan at all and simply paying cash for every meal.)

If my daughter had wanted to, she could have refused to sign her housing contract and gone off-campus instead. There were still places available at that time, but they were mostly undesirable ones. Most of what’s available off-campus at the time of the housing lottery either 1) is inconveniently located or 2) consists of a room in an apartment occupied by a group of people who need one more roommate (not a great situation because the other people all know each other and the new roommate doesn’t). In her opinion, Cascadilla was the better option.