Upperclassmen housing

Upperclassmen housing for undergraduates at Columbia is available in every Housing Services building with the exception of John Jay and Carman. Furnald is open only to sophomores.

Housing Options

Housing at Columbia typically falls into one of three categories:

Hallway Dormitory: These are the classic college dormitories. Rows of singles and doubles lining a hallway. Typically each floor shares a common area, bathrooms, and sometimes a kitchen. The defining characteristic is that you don't have any say over who else is living on your floor. Hallway dormitories include John Jay, Furnald, Wien, McBain, Broadway, Carman, and Schapiro.

Suite/Apartment: These are self-contained units that you live in with friends. They range in size from 2-person to 8-person and generally have their own bathroom, kitchen, and sometimes a common area/living room. These are generally among the most sought after arrangements since you get to share your living quarters with a group of friends and no one else, and there's minimal, if any, supervision from Resident Advisers etc. Buildings include East Campus, Hogan, Ruggles, 47 Claremont, Woodbridge, and Watt.

Hybrid: These are dormitories that are laid out somewhat like suites, with a smaller number of rooms sharing a bathroom and kitchen and common area, but unlike with true suites, rooms are picked into individually rather than all together. Buildings include River, 600 West 113th Street, Hartley Hall, and Wallach Hall.

Room Selection

Every spring, Housing Services conducts the Room Selection process. At first glance the process is incredibly confusing and hard to understand. In reality it's very straightforward. The process of three stages - Registration, the Lottery, and then Selection. Selection itself consists of two phases, Group Selection, and then General Selection.

Registration

The first step in room selection is to register for the lottery. Registering for the housing lottery doesn't sound like it's difficult. It turns out that it's one of the most cut-throat, political, and personally challenging exercises in calculated gambling you'll take part in during college. Friendships will be tested, alliances of convenience forged, and drama will ensue.

You have the option of entering into the lottery as an individual or as a group. Simple enough. But your group must be between 2 and 8 people, and the size of your group has serious consequences during the selection stage. You can only pick a room of the same size as your group, and invariably there will be more groups of every size than there are suites of that size. The exception is groups of 2 because even when studios and apartments in Watt and Woodbridge (coveted by senior and junior groups of 2) run out, there are doubles in McBain and Nussbaum (refuge of sophomores, and disappointed juniors). As a result, choosing what size group you want to register other than 2 becomes a very big deal in attempting to gain an elusive edge since there are always inefficiencies in group size distribution. Most of the fluctuation in group size registrations in the lottery[1] can be attributed to students picking group sizedsbased on a rough guess as to which will be the 'best' size to choose based on the previous years lottery. And from that comes the politics - in some cases excluding friends to trim down to the right size, in others 'recruiting' warm bodies to get to the right size, and perhaps in the process scuttling another group's attempt to find the right size.

As an individual you will have the option of picking a single during the second phase of selection stage (after all the groups have tried to pick a room), or if there are no singles left by your turn (which is very likely if you're a sophomore), picking into an empty, or half-double that another unfortunate sophomore has already picked into. These rooms are called blind doubles, since you might be picking into a room with a stranger (unless you can find a friend or acquaintance in similar situation).

Lottery

Students have until a deadline to register for the lottery. Once the deadline passes the computer lottery is run and a schedule is generated. Groups are sorted in two passes. First groups are assigned a seniority value. Each student in the lottery has a value - Sophomores 10, Juniors 20, and Seniors 30. The values of members of a group are averaged to come up with a composite value for the group. Groups are sorted in order of descending seniorty, and then within seniority groups by their randomly assigned lottery values.

Selection

The iron rule by which selection runs is very simple - square pegs must fit in square holes, no exceptions. In order to run an efficient, clean, and unmessy selection process, selection occurs in two passes. In the first pass, Group Selection, students who have registered as groups pick their housing options. This is where the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade-esque decision comes into play. When your turn comes and no suite of corresponding size is available, your group is essentially 'dropped' into the second pass of selection (though keeping the same seniority value and assigned lottery number when generating the General Selection order) and must pick into singles and doubles that were leftover when groups of 2 ran out (the only size of which there are more rooms than groups) on your own in General Selection.

Because lottery numbers have been assigned to everyone in advance, is possible for groups to 'count' and deliberately drop into General Selection. This happens in two cases typically - senior groups with incredible lottery numbers dropping into general so that all the group members pick a Watt studio single for themselves, and Sophomores who want singles but hedging their bets. A sophomore group of 2 can count ahead before their turn comes in Group Selection to see if there would be any singles left by the time everyone ahead of them in General Selection finished picking. If yes, they can drop. If not, they can select a double together, a room that will almost undoubtedly be better than the double they would have picked into blindly during General Selction, because it would have been a leftover.