<p>For dorming, I mean. Thats what my neighbor, whose son goes to UCLA or whatever, said.</p>
<p>I don't have a problem. I just thought I could meet some new people, but apparently, according to my neighbor and some other people. UC does this.</p>
<p>Could anyone clarify?</p>
<p>Nope (not automatically).</p>
<p>so, you can request someone you know to room with you, but it has to be a mutual agreement, meaning that the person must also request you on his/her housing application. Also, you both must have the exact same housing choices (the list in the same order)</p>
<p>^yes i know that. thats not what im asking though.</p>
<p>and thanks olvidarse</p>
<p>milktea11 is telling you what happens - it is the actual process and answers your question, other than having prefixed it with "No, . . . "</p>
<p>Housing is assigned randomly, basically starting with a ‘lottery number’ for each incoming student. In order of lottery numbers, they go through your preferences looking for a match. if you first choice preference is already full, they shift to second, etc, with the ‘any room at all’ choice at the end snagging you something at worst case. </p>
<p>If several people have mutually listed each other, when the first of them is ready for assignment, the system will put them together if the room type is available that they all listed. If the first choice is the same, but that type of room is already depleted, and the second choices of the students are different, the matching fails. If they all have compatible preferences, they are put together. In essence, the first of them to go through assignment will pull the others ‘to the front of the line’ to be assigned together, rather than at the time of their own lottery numbers. </p>
<p>From prior years, when system errors let the room assignments be visible for a few days, we saw that they seem to assign the rooms sequentially during the lottery, by type. Since the lottery number is random, so is the room assigned.</p>
<p>Then, each unit and building goes through the list after some students seek changes, some decide not to stay in the dorms, and so forth. If a person is gone from each of two separate doubles, they would move one of the remaining people in with the other to end up with a filled double and an open room. Thus, the initial assignments done randomly do get mixed around a bit, but only for a small fraction of the students. </p>
<p>Lots of evidence over years and years that there is zero effort to put people together by high school, home town or any other criteria (other than sex).</p>
<p>Thanks for your reply, rider730, was quite enlightening (even though I already knew the general process, the insight into the ‘mutual agreement’ thing was valuable).</p>
<p>If you went to Hogwarts, they automatically assign you to Bowles. (Sorry, had to throw that in there)</p>
<p>And to answer your question, no. Your neighbor and friends are either not being very truthful or don’t know what they’re talking about.</p>
<p>If you think about if from the standpoint of writing the program to do housing assignments, it pretty much has to work that way, otherwise you would have an ambiguous assignment for the first of the requesting students, later might find out they don’t have same preferences, so would have to backtrack to change the first student. too messy.</p>