Housing Selections Cause Headaches
Camron Canniff
This past year, Manchester University adopted the first-year dorm policy, in which all incoming first-year students were to be placed in East or Garver Halls.
In the previous years, all dorms have been a mixture of first-years, sophomores, juniors and seniors. The process for sophomores through juniors to select their housing was time-consuming and could have been handled more efficiently to ensure a positive experience for all students.
Now, the upperclassman halls are Helman Hall, Oakwood Hall and Schwalm Hall. I believe East and Garver were chosen because of cost and location of the dorms on our campus. They are the cheapest and are close to the buildings that are needed for school, meals and athletic use.
To sign up for the next year’s housing plans, Residential Life held a session to begin the process of which hall a student would live in. This process allows all students that are living on campus to wait in a line to sign up for a hall to live in.
This year, I am living in Helman Hall. Helman and Oakwood are suite-style, opposed to the three other dorms that are community style. My process to get into Helman was quite difficult and took some time because I originally wanted to live in Oakwood Hall.
Three of my friends and I waited an hour in line to try to get into a suite in Oakwood. We were under the impression that we could all live together but that was never promised. We waited for about an hour and we were told that they ran out of rooms but we could still get a room for ourselves, meaning that we would live with a random person that we may not know.
Once we received the information, we saw the short line for Helman and we jumped over quickly. This hall didn’t have a full suite open either, but had rooms for two people. It wasn’t what we preferred, but it had to work if we wanted to live in in a suite-style dorm instead of a community-style one.
To make the process for housing go more quickly, I think they should have just sent out forms through emails allowing everyone to sign up in a quicker and more efficient way. I think this would be a better option because a lot of time was spent waiting to sign up.
Once a student got up to the table to sign room forms, it took about five to ten minutes. Many people waited hours to sign up and some did not even get into a dorm of their choosing. Overall, it wasn’t a waste of time, but changes should be made in the future in order to make the process smoother and more efficient.