[AllHouse] Re: The Lottery

Dear members of the house community,

The Lottery is upon us!

Your faculty deans and resident tutors have been working diligently for the past few months with the FAS and the OSL to provide you with a wonderful housing experience next year. To that end, we will formally kick off the lottery process at 8 pm on Wednesday in the JCR. The freshmen will arrive first and begin collecting stones until the tutors call the meeting to order. As this is an important House tradition, we ask that you please make every effort not to be late.

As mentioned previously, the available room sizes are singles, doubles, and quads. By now, you will also have submitted your room block preferences. Your Faculty Deans will call each person who registered their room block forward to draw a slip of paper out of a black wooden box. Once every group has chosen, you will be instructed to unfold your slip of paper to see which group has been picked this year to receive n+1 housing. 

In the past, we have received complaints that this process leads to tension and stress when selecting who to include in your room block. Although keeping the house community intact and close together has always been a goal of ours, we ultimately concluded that the lottery system is necessary to maintain current living norms.

For those unfamiliar with the rest of the process, your Faculty Deans will place a number of paper slips equal to the size of the selected group into the box. Each member of the group then draws one slip. If yours is blank, congratulations! You will be in the enviable position of having n+1 instead of n housing next year. If you draw the slip with the big black dot in the center...

Well...

We can’t let the freshmen’s work go to waste.

Finally, we wish to offer our profound thanks to the house administrators and tutors for all the work they put into making the lottery and fun and fulfilling experience. We hope you are having a terrific week, and look forward to welcoming you back next semester. Maybe.

Warmly,

Your Faculty Deans