Underclassmen Gear Up for Housing Selection

By ELIZABETH GARDNER Sun Contributor

With housing lottery time slots released and available to view on their housing portals, students who need to apply for on-campus housing next year are anxiously awaiting room selection to start on March 13.

According to Kristen Loparco, director of Housing and Dining Contracts, students apply for housing in early January. In the application, students can make six-person roommate ‘blocks’ and assign block leaders, who are responsible for distributing beds to each person in the block.

“In early March, all students who applied will be issued a time slot. All members of a roommate group have the same time slot,” Loparco wrote in an email to The Sun. “During the allotted time, students will log in to the housing portal to select rooms.”

Students can live in three main areas — North Campus, South Campus and West Campus. Due to proximity and access to dining halls, West Campus housing is often most desirable and the first to run out of spots.

“It’s a sprint to get on West Campus with your friends,” said Claire Williamson ’25.

To ensure fairness, a lottery system randomly issues 20-minute time slots across three days to each student who applied to live in an on-campus residence hall. This system has caused stress among Cornelians, especially those with late time slots on March 15, the last day for selection.

Analisa Martino ’26 has a timeslot on the last day of selection. Martino expressed concern that students will fill all the spots in the newer North and West Campus buildings during the earlier time slots.

“[The lottery] is not a hundred percent fair because there are these new buildings that are super nice and then there [are] buildings that can’t even compare,” Martino said. “Obviously everyone’s going to go for the good buildings at the beginning.” lifestyle itself is very American and therefore not too difficult to adjust to.

Martino also noted that dorm quality does not factor into the price students pay for on-campus housing. She suggests an alternative method of distributing housing slots, one she believes is more fair.

“It could be first come first serve, where people who have their applications submitted first get first pick,” Martino said.

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“People usually speak Singlish, which incorporates Hokkien, Mandarin [and] Malay. And sometimes people’s words, grammar or slang is different from what I’m used to,” Hidalgo said. “Socially people are pretty similar to Americans, so I didn’t find it hard to get along with people.”

Communities and Friends

For Hidalgo, community at the National University of Singapore was anticipated because of the dormitory system.

“Their dorms are very close-knit communities — for example, [the school] has 20 different sports teams for every dorm and they compete in inter-dorm competitions,” Hidalgo said. “People are super involved — you know everyone on your floor and are friends with people who you live next to you.”

Xu would also agree to some extent, as she made friends through kitchen conversations.

“I’ve been able to meet friends in unconventional ways — with people living across the hall when we share the kitchen and have conversations,” Xu said.

After a group project meeting that went on until 1 a.m., Hidalgo learned the culture of staying up late in Singapore.

“They also have sports activities that meet at 11 p.m. and go until 2 a.m. They order a meal after dinner almost every night. We still have 8 a.m. classes.” Hidalgo thinks this culture might be in part because classes only meet once a week, so students do not have packed schedules. Though Bustos has been able to meet students from different countries through mixers designed specifically for visiting students, she struggles to meet British students.

“I know people in my hall, but it’s tough especially because the third year is the last year [in UK universities], so they’re already in their groups,” Bustos said.

Regardless, she got involved with drama events and has crewed for the musical “The Addams Family” organized by her college.

“It feels like Fall semester of freshman year — meeting everyone during orientation, asking their names, hometowns, planning lunch,” Zhang said.

Zhang finds this aspect of building community from scratch exciting, but she misses the support system and people she loves and appreciates in Ithaca.

Food

There are still many practices that are inherently hard to adjust to coming from an American collegiate lifestyle.