All Freshmen Placed In Top Four Dormitory Choices, Like Last Year
About the same percentage of incoming freshmen received their top choices in this year’s Summer Housing Lottery compared with last year. The Housing Lottery placed the students of the Class of 2012 in their top four dormitory choices like last year; the two years prior, the freshman class was placed in their top three choices.
According to Robin Smedick, assistant director of undergraduate housing, 64 percent of the Class of 2012 received their first choice dormitory, 24 percent received their second choice, 11 percent received their third choice, and 1 percent received their fourth choice.
Last year, 61 percent of the Class of 2011 received their first choice residence, 27 percent received their second, 8 percent received their third, and 4 percent received their fourth. (See tables on page 9 for additional statistics.)
The Housing Office partners with Information Services & Technology on an algorithm that achieves the highest rate of satisfaction for freshmen.
Slight changes in lottery results each year are a result of differences in student preferences and the number of spaces in each hall, Smedick said. This year, the addition of spaces in NW35 for freshmen may have also contributed to small changes. NW35 is the new graduate dormitory, Ashdown House, that will house a small community of undergraduates. This community will move into W1 when the building is converted into an undergraduate dorm in 2010.
Additionally, more people were interested in Next House this year over the previous year, Smedick said. “Last year, there were far fewer students ranking Next as a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice than this year,” she said in an e-mail.
Beginning this fall, freshmen placed in Next House during the summer lottery will be able to enter the Housing Adjustment Lottery. The Adjustment Lottery allows freshmen to either choose to stay in the building they were assigned to during the summer or rank up to four other dorms to which they would like to move.
Freshmen placed in Next House were previously not able to switch into a different dormitory during their first year because of Residence-Based Advising. Students in Next House have long pushed for the change because they wanted more flexibility.
In order to accommodate the change, the Adjustment Lottery will be closing a few hours earlier than usual today, at 4 p.m. instead of 6:30 p.m., because students moving in and out of Next House will need to be assigned new advisers.
The timetable of REX was also moved up to accommodate the change.
This year, Baker House was the most requested dormitory, with 300 students selecting it as their first choice dormitory. Following Baker are Simmons with 195 students indicating it as their first-choice, Burton-Conner with 144 students, MacGregor House with 97 students, and East Campus with 83 students.
There were 1,054 incoming freshmen at the time of the summer lottery, Smedick said. By late last week, the number of incoming freshmen had decreased to 1,049, one of whom is living off campus. “A freshmen ‘melt’ is usually the result of a student deciding to pursue education at another university, delaying admission to MIT, or not attending for other various reasons,” Smedick said in an e-mail.
The Adjustment Lottery opened last Thursday, Aug. 21 at noon and will close today at 4 p.m. The lottery is open to all freshmen interested in changing their fall dormitory placement except those who have been placed in McCormick Hall. Unlike Next House, students in McCormick’s Residence-Based Advising program cannot transfer to other dorms. Last December, when Next House announced the change to their RBA program, McCormick’s housemaster Charles H. Stewart III told The Tech that RBA had worked well for the dormitory over the last seven years.
Lottery results will be released tomorrow after 6 p.m., and in-house rush will follow. To enter the lottery or to confirm your summer housing assignment, visit http://web.mit.edu/housinglottery/.