People think that finals are the absolute worst. They are definitely high on the scale of things Mawrters hate, but Room Draw takes the cake.
Each year, the Residential Life Office initiates the process of determining your housing fate during Spring Break (which is sometimes a drag), and from that moment on, the stress piles up. First, you are assigned a randomly-generated number (unless you are one of the fortuanate people who won a raffle at Plenary and got an amazing number). Second, you either celebrate, cry, or worry about what that number means. Typically, the first 100 means you can pretty much get whichever dorm you want. For the rest of the grades, you cozy up to people you may not know that well to increase your chances of getting what you want, or form alliances for hall groups. Next, you (should) strategize. If you convince someone with a great number to get a double or triple with you, then awesome! If you are friends with an upperclassman, you try for a hall group. Then, you sign up for as many different combinations of housing arrangements as you possibly can and await the day where your fate is sealed.
On the day of hall group and multiple occupancy draw, hundreds gather in TGH with laptops and notebooks and tissues at hand. The hall groups go first, from the 7-person down to all of the 2-person. Cheers of delight and anguish reverberate around the hall, depending on if you got your coveted hall group, while Res-Life heads Angie and ViAnna try hard to not laugh at us students, as they are seasoned experts on this process. Then, multiple occupancy draw begins, with the triple options going first, and then the doubles. Again, cheers of delight and anguish once again resonate.
Then, if you are unhappy with the outcome, there is always single draw. Typically, people with numbers above 50 are in high attendance, as they are certain that they will get their desired dorm, but people who also did not get what they want in the previous week also attend to try their luck at getting a single somewhere. Anguish and delight repeat, and before you know it, the night is over.
But WAIT, you are still not done! Next, you attend the dorm meeting of the future place you will live to pick the specific individual rooms and to elect the future Dorm Presidents. This process typically does not take long, but is arguably the most crucial in the entire series of steps.
And, for most people, room draw concludes. But, if you change your mind about where you want to live, there is the room swap period, where you can put your room up as an option to switch out of and into another one, if you so choose, and that does not conclude until around May Day.
The most important thing to remember though is that EVERYONE gets a room, no matter what. Housing is guaranteed, so you will have a place to live no matter what. But if you see someone stressed around campus, it is probably room draw related (unless it is an angsty Senior in distress about thesising).
In the words of last year’s room draw theme Survivor: “Athena has spoken.”