But at whose expense do these wrinkles get ironed out? Housing is a very important thing for many students; it's not the type of thing that should be tinkered with if someone is going to suffer.
One of the problems seemed to be that things were so confusing. I'm not sure why this was; maybe it is because the system is new. Quite a few people were unsure about what they could and could not do. For example, if someone you wanted to live with was squatting and you wanted to move in with him, why couldn't you go to room selection on the first night? Although Residential Services described the process, people still got confused.
Perhaps one of the worst things that happened last week, however, happened on the last day of room selection. This was the day that students move into different buildings, or from off-campus to on-campus rooms. Some concerned students camped out in the Wedge overnight in hopes of getting to be first in the first-come, first-serve order.
Residential Services typically started to give tickets representing who was first at around 4:30pm on previous days. On this day, however, Res Services decided to throw that out the window and started giving out these tickets around 12:00pm! This was ridiculous: for a whole half hour, students were given these tickets. One hundred tickets were given out in that time.
An argument for doing this might be that the campers would have been the first anyway, so it didn't matter if they were given a ticket at 12:00pm or at 4:30pm. They might have been first either way. I guess this is one of those wrinkles that has to be ironed out. You just can't change the rules in the middle of the game, though! Consider a different scenario: If a bunch of residents were being loud one night, the police won't extend quiet hours for them, no matter how many loud residents there were! Similarly, no matter how many people camped out in the Wedge, the time at which "first-come, first-serve"ness would be determined should not have moved!
Had I followed the rules and gone to the Wedge at 4:30pm to get in order, I would have been very much out of luck. As it was, I had number 101 (I caught Kris on her way out of the Wedge). Granted, it appears as if everyone who wanted housing got it. However, I know a fair number of people who are displeased with their housing situation: they got rooms they didn't want, or they're living with roommates they have never heard of before.
Even though everyone hated it, the lottery was fair. It was random. It let people know ahead of time if they should probably be looking for off-campus housing. People were yearning for the lottery last week. Is this new system really the way to go?