With housing selection number 656 within the incoming sophomore class, my mind began to wander with the wondrous possibilities of living on South Campus or even Bay State Road as a back up.
Ha ha, cough, ha ha.
I didn’t exactly get what I was hoping for. But for my sophomore year I’ll be living once again at 700 Commonwealth Ave. Do I blame myself? No. I blame everyone else in my class who had friends pull them in. Just because I don’t have friends doesn’t mean I should be stuck in Warren again.
I had asked for a housing assignment in the Hotel Commonwealth, but the Office of Housing employee laughed at me. I mean, hell, it’s going to be a dorm in a couple years anyway.
Then I asked for South. Nothing. Then I asked for Bay State. Nothing. Then I asked for ‘HoJo.’ Nothing but a bunch of triples that already were partly occupied. Great.
The person who was helping me told me I should have applied for specialty housing, and then I could have gotten my pick of the litter. Unfortunately, I don’t speak French, am very unsure of what Core is (or why anyone would want to take it), am not in the College of General Studies and not smart enough for the Honors House. I don’t feel like lying to get in either.
The process for selecting housing was unfair and unnecessary. If all of the students are going to get pulled in, why even have a lottery system? Most of the prime, and even some of the not-so-prime housing on campus was gone before the freshmen even got to begin selection.
Housing selection is not about getting a good number, like it should be. It’s about swindling the Office of Housing and bypassing all of the rules they have created.
Example: A person I know direct swapped with a friend of theirs and then switched ID cards so they could still swipe in at their respective residences. When time came for housing selection, the person I know simply picked his ‘own room’ and was guaranteed one of the best brownstones on campus.
Great idea wish I’d thought of it.
But I didn’t. So now I will live in A tower. At least I got to pick what tower I wanted to live in.
The Office of Housing should reexamine the rules they’ve set for housing selection to make it fair. I suggest incoming sophomores should not be allowed to be pulled in to any on-campus residence, like at the Student Village. A housing lottery should be just that and not a ‘Crap, I got a bad number so let me fake liking this girl so I can use her to get into a good brownstone in South’ lottery.
Those with bad numbers should be stuck with relatively bad housing. And a good number should give the lucky ones a right to good housing.
In order to fix the massive problem with housing selections, the Office of Housing and the university should make some major changes.
First, by restricting incoming sophomores from being pulled in, the housing selection process would be fair to all students. No student, except for those with special health or other circumstances, should be allowed to have better housing because they know somebody older.
Second, the university needs to decrease the number of incoming freshmen they admit. This will solve two problems by both opening more housing to those who wish to stay on campus and by making BU more desirable by being more selective.
Third, the university needs to get cracking on the rest of the Student Village and stop working on meaningless projects like the Hotel Commonwealth. I don’t feel like paying for something I would have to pay $150 per night to stay in. Yeah, and repaint it as well, ’cause it’s ugly.
The housing problem, which started this year, will just get worse over time if changes such as these are not made. The Office of Housing and the university need to look into either reducing the number of students they accept or increasing the number of dorms on campus. Otherwise the university will be stuck paying the Hyatt and the Radisson millions of dollars per year.
To top it all off, I will be living in a building next year that Chancellor John Silber said this about: ‘I don’t ever want to be accused of building that monstrosity … [but it] beats the hell out of being homeless.’
[ Patrick Gillooly, a freshman in the College of Communication, is an assistant news editor of The Daily Free Press. ]
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