Office of Housing and Residence Life @ Mason

Housing Selection – Guaranteed Waitlist & Seniority

February 1, 2012

Hi Everyone,

The next few blog posts will address the changes that are being made in this year’s Housing Selection.  As noted in our emails to residents, the housing options at Mason have been expanding over the past few years, with no corresponding update to Housing Selection.  This fall a group of staff and students convened to review the process and determine how to best create communities that foster student success.  They developed a list of outcomes that would better serve residents, including:

• Improving the ability for friends to live together
• Increasing the variety of rooms available during selection
• Ensuring that students earlier in their academic career are not on a housing waiting list

This year, after all Housing Selection applications are submitted (Feb 13-17), if there are more applications than there are spaces currently available, the applicants with the greatest seniority will be placed directly on the Guaranteed Waitlist.

• For example, if there are 3900 applications but only 3800 spaces available, 100 students, most likely rising seniors, will go directly to the Guaranteed Waitlist.  They will still be guaranteed a housing assignment, but they will not participate in selection.  The remaining 3800 students will proceed through selection and be assured that a space will be available for them to select.

The average seniority of groups will be used to determine the selection order for these remaining (3800, in this example) students, with groups with higher average seniority selecting earlier. It is possible that there will be more groups of students seeking a given suite size than there are suites available. In this scenario, the groups with the highest average seniority will wait for a later selection round. Those groups who are selecting will select in order of highest average seniority to lowest, so groups with more seniors will still be selecting before groups with more sophomores.

• For example, if 100 groups of six apply, but there are only 80 six-person suites available, the 20 groups with the highest average seniority will not participate in groups-of-six selection.  Members of these 20 extra groups will be able to select during individual selection.
• In this example, the 80 groups who are selecting will still select in order of highest average seniority to least.
• During individual selection, students with the highest seniority will select first.

In short, while students with the most seniority may go directly to the Guaranteed Waitlist, for the majority of students, seniority will still benefit them in this process.  To be clear, groups of seniors will still select before groups of juniors, who will select before groups of sophomores.

Please feel free to contact us, attend an info session, or visit us during office hours if you have further questions.

Entry Filed under: Housing Selection 2012-2013,OHRL information. Posted in  Housing Selection 2012-2013 ,OHRL information .