I for one am quite excited about the upcoming ORL room application season. Or at least I was until I got my housing number, which is 1918, and the '01s start at 1100. Where's the justice there? This was supposed to be the year when all we '01s finally got the mythical Mass Row single, but damn it all, I'm probably going to be living in the River again.
At least the process should be more fun this year. Under the new "Room Draw" system, we will all meet in the gym and be allowed to choose the same crappy room ORL would have stuck us with anyway. As I understand it, the primary benefit of the new Room Draw is that Lynn Rosenblum gets to see all the kids who get stuck in the Choates cry in person.
The Room Draw takes place on a number of nights, with the highest-seniority people scheduled to choose first. On May 1st and 2nd, the active olders and we seniors pick rooms. Or rather, the active olders and the rising seniors with good housing numbers pick rooms (including my roommate, who is enjoying his #1126 way too much), and then I take whatever is left.
You know, as long as we're reforming the whole housing selection process this year, I think we may as well do something about those active olders (a.k.a. the "slow learners.") Y'all are getting out of control! I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being a career college student with an income of "32,000 dollars per year. It's just that at some point, it's time to graduate, kids! A handy rule of thumb here is that if your class year has any "9s" in it, it's time to think about leaving. In order to encourage timely departure from the fruited Hanover plain, here's my idea: the first year after you should have graduated, you are in the housing pool with the rising juniors. The year after, with the sophomores. After that, it's all River, all the time. A major added benefit of this plan is that it would bump me closer to the front of the housing number pack.
Anyhow, we'll show up those two nights, and the slow learners will pick their giant singles, then all the rising seniors, and then me. Room Pick will proceed along these lines down through the lower rungs of the housing food chain. I am sure it will be a good time for you '03s. It's a tough call between that one room windowless triple in the basement of the River or the basement of the Choates.
And that's if you get a room at all. Don't let Uncle Rob scare you too much here kids, but some of his '01 friends didn't get a room back in the 98F day. It would seem to me that if there's 100-odd people who don't get assigned housing every fall, the simple fix is a) build a dorm or b) don't accept quite so goddamn many freshmen.
Having seen the pace of construction around here, I tend to vote for choice b. Living in La Casa, we get to observe first hand the warp-speed project over in Steele that, as nearly as I can determine, so far has consisted of adding a nice shiny new steel scaffold onto the exterior of the building. There seem to be a grand total of two scaffold installation workers, one based on the ground and the other up on the third floor. The one on the ground yells at the one on the third floor, who proceeds to drop something heavy and metallic into the metal dumpster, apparently for the express purpose of waking me up. A half-hour later the process repeats. I am not sure what this has accomplished so far other than perhaps an elaborate, 400-year late independent verification of Galileo's falling bodies experiment. He was correct you morons! Stop waking me up!
Seeing as the construction isn't working out too well, it doesn't seem like that big a deal to take a few less freshmen this admissions season. Or alternately we upper-class people could do some natural selection on the '04s. Resources are low so time to cull the Dartmouth herd a bit. The way I would propose doing this is that you '03s who end up without a room can go bump off a '04 and annex the territory. Alternately, if you want a really sweet room you could knock off a slow learner or a senior--don't bother taking my room though; housing number-wise it's just not going to be worth the trouble.
