Sophomore Speaks StarRez serves student stress and satisfaction

With students scrambling to get last-minute work done, another very important task was asked of them during this somewhat stressful time. Housing selections this year were done online, as opposed to previous years when students had to go to the Student Recreation Center (SRC) to choose their rooms.
For those who did not participate in the housing selection process this year, the online process, which used a program called StarRez, pretty much progressed as follows. Students had to set up an account through the myRider portal. Afterwards, they had the chance to submit answers in a personality-style profile to see if they have anything in common with potential future roommates if they went with the random roommate option. Then, students waited for their lottery numbers, which were based on how soon housing deposits were sent in and their class year.
Those who chose to participate in premium-housing groups had to form their roommate groups of two, three, four or six from March 25 – 28. These groups hoped that, through the online process, they would get the chance to live in some of the more ritzy dorms, such as the suites in Hank and Bonnie Moore Hall as well as West Village. The housing selection process began on April 1 starting with Greek residents and concluded on April 17 with the standard housing selection.
I think that this new way of selecting housing was a lot more organized in comparison to previous years. As a sophomore, I know how hectic it was last year to try to fit everyone in the SRC to pick housing. It was a lot easier to just sit down at the computer with my future roommate and do everything online.
Last year for room selection, everyone in my lottery number range had to be at the SRC at 10 p.m. The worse the lottery number, the later the selection time. This year, the time slots for the online housing selection were still somewhat inconvenient.
I participated in the premium housing process online and chose my room at 1 p.m. which caused my future roommate to be a few minutes late to her 1:10 p.m. class. Besides that, it was mostly stress-free — until the server started to glitch because there were too many people online at once.
My future roommate and I tried to choose a room in one building, but it said that there were no rooms available whatsoever, for any buildings. After refreshing the page, rooms were made available that were not before. I think that if the time slots were more spread out, a glitch probably would not have occurred.
In the end, everything worked out, and I’ll be living in a beautiful West Village room, and hopefully, every other student had an easier time picking a room for the 2013-14 school year.

-J’na Jefferson
Sophomore journalism major

Printed in the 4/26/13 edition.