With Segment I of the housing lottery scheduled to begin this evening at 6 p.m. in Salomon 101, students are gearing up for what one called an experience "more intense than watching the NBA draft."
Lottery numbers for four- and eight-person suites were posted in Wayland Arch Tuesday around 5 p.m.
Jane Wang '07 said she is hoping for a four-person suite in New Dorm tonight. "The thing about the housing lottery is that I think for a lot of people, it's the time in their life when they realize they don't have as many friends as they thought they had," she said.
"I really lucked out because I was an MPC my sophomore year and I didn't have to deal with any of the housing lottery drama," she said.
"I can't even count how many people I've talked to who don't know what they're doing yet," Wang added. "When it comes time to find someone to live with, it's a lot harder than you thought it would be."
Wang said she can't wait for the whole process to be over. "I've been having dreams where I get a really good number, and we pick a corner suite in New Dorm and jump up and down in celebration," she said. "It is so consuming."
Ricardo Santiago '06, who applied with three friends for a four-person suite - preferably in Young Orchard or New Dorm - is ranked 31 and says he is feeling optimistic about his group's chances.
"That's a pretty good number - it's not amazing, but it's not really bad either," he said. Santiago conceded that suites in those dorms are usually in the highest demand, but since most seniors move off campus anyway, he is confident that "we'll have a few choices there at least."
Santiago's living arrangements next year will most likely be more luxurious than in the past: As a sophomore, he found himself in a Barbour Hall suite of two doubles and a single, but to get to one of the doubles it was necessary to walk through the single. Naturally, the single belonged to him.
"Every time somebody entered they were basically walking through my room," Santiago said. "I went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of 1-by-2 pieces of wood and built a wall to create a hallway. I had (the room) all year, but it wasn't that bad because I put the wall up."
For Anna Isaacs '07, a series of bad-luck lottery numbers meant she spent last semester living with people she didn't want to live with. She and several different combinations of friends entered numerous segments of the lottery for suites last spring, but in the end, three of them, including Isaacs, ended up on the summer waitlist for a double and a single. Come fall, Isaacs found herself in a triple in Keeney.
"We went on the waitlist to be in the same area, but not in the same room," she said. "I didn't want to live with them. I had wanted my own room. I just really hated the housing lottery. It's not really a good system, even for social relations, because you've alienated your friends and you've gotten screwed over and you don't really know where to turn from that."
Isaacs and her two roommates moved into singles in Machado House at the beginning of the semester to avoid the "red tape" at ResLife. "We went on the fall waiting list, but it didn't look like we were going to be getting anything, so we just joined Machado," she said.
Jason Miller '05 lives in East Andrews Hall, in one of the biggest singles on campus. But "I had one of the worst senior numbers - most of the people living in this hall are juniors," he said of last spring's housing lottery, an experience he said he is glad he will never have to repeat.
His sophomore year, Miller and four friends were second runners-up in ResLife's contest for first pick in the housing lottery, and he has been "pretty disillusioned with the process" since then.
"The year we did (the contest) there weren't a lot of rules, just that you had to lip-synch a song," Miller said. He and his potential suitemates dressed in white underwear with "big green leaves covering our crotches" and lip-synched to "Yatta," a Japanese pop song that Miller said was popular across college campuses at the time. In preparation for the contest, which was held live in Salomon 101 before a panel of judges and audience of about 200 students, Miller and his friends practiced two days a week for about a month.
"We had the whole dance down," Miller said. "We put an unnecessarily large amount of work into this. We ended up losing to two teams, both of which were perfectly good - but we were particularly disappointed that we got third place to a group who lip-synched to techno. They weren't even singing. We were baffled - at one point they came out with glow sticks and started raving," he said.
"Some of them could break-dance," he said, but "we were expecting to win, because we thought we had a really novel idea, and were executing it as best we could."
Four of Miller's friends decided to live off-campus as a result of their loss. Miller took a year off and traveled to Egypt.
