It’s housing selection season.
The housing selection process for living on campus begins when you pay your housing deposit, but for many, it doesn’t begin until you, in a panicked fervor, realize you don’t know where you’re planning to live next year.
As a Resident Assistant on campus, I’m familiar with the housing selection process, and often field a lot of questions from residents in varying states of panic. The general idea of housing is as follows: the average of the academic credits your housing group has earned gets you a 3 minute time frame where you are allowed to log onto to the housing software and select what building and room you’d like to live in.
Every March, I realize just how important housing, and where and with whom you are going to live next year is to your college experience and perceived happiness. In class, we’ve been talking about housing on a large scale, and the important role of having a concrete place to live safely long term, in regards to slavery or the housing crisis, but there are also smaller scale examples that might be easy to relate to or digest.
Personally, I’ve been lucky enough to be an RA for the past two years, so I’ve only gone through the housing process at Geneseo once, when I was randomly paired with another freshman to live with. However, when I started to think about who I wanted to live with, I did a lot of self reflection about what I need from someone I’m going to share a space with, and I was extraordinarily anxious about living with someone I did not know very well. Like I said earlier, I’ve had an RA single for my sophomore and junior year, but both years I’ve still vicariously felt this anxiety through those who come to me for help.