<p>How does the housing work? How do I get to know if I will have a room on-campus and where do I ask for one? a simple room or a shared room, doesn't matter, but how and where? has the deadline for doing that already passed?</p>
<p>I would just quote ammarsfound
</p>
<p>I think they assign roommates(and rooms) randomly during orientation. After some time you get to choose.</p>
<p>The housing selection process at MIT differs from anywhere else I've heard about, so get ready for a journey. I am not a student, but I watched my son go through this, and a couple years worth of CC students, so I'll explain what it looked like to me.</p>
<p>Over the summer, students who have accepted an offer of admission are sent, among other things, the I^3, a DVD made by all of the dorms. You as a student look at the I^3 (and obsess on places like CC ;) ) and then send back a ranked list of all (17?) dorms, in the order in which you'd like to live in them AS YOUR TEMP DORM DURING ORIENTATION. A matching process then occurs to attempt to maximize the number of prefrosh assigned to their preferred temp dorm, based on space availability. The vast majority get their first or second choice, and pretty much everyone gets their third choice or better. But remember, THIS IS JUST YOUR TEMP DORM. (Stay with me, this is a little confusing at first.) Around mid-July, you are informed which dorm you'll be temped into. You arrive on campus for orientation and move into that room, BUT DON'T UNPACK. You'll be living out of a suitcase for a week while you participate in REX (Residential EXploration or something like that -- basically you have the chance to visit all the dorms, and all the wing/floors/entries of the dorms, and decide where you REALLY want to live, based on who's already there and what the culture is like there). At the end of REX you may submit a request to the readjustment lottery, where another matching takes place in an attempt to get you into a dorm you prefer. (If you like the dorm you were temped into, you may stay, you'll never be kicked out if you don't want to move.) After the dorm readjustment, there is a wing/floor/entry assignment (so be sure to let the folks on the wing/floor/entry you prefer know during REX that you want to live there!) done by the dorms themselves, then there is the actual room assignment. </p>
<p>The weird "rule" (which I'm told is seldom violated, but can very rarely be gotten around) is that you MAY NOT live permanently in the same room in which you temped (hence my suggestion not to unpack :) ). My son, for instance, stayed permanently on the same floor of the same dorm with the same roommate he temped with, but was forced to move from one crowd-double (a former single room in which two students were placed because of crowding conditions) into an empty crowd-double RIGHT ACROSS THE HALL, leaving their temp crowd-double EMPTY. Go figure.</p>
<p>Generally during REX, you may find someone you want to room with, and you can "staple" your requests together so you're assigned together. Otherwise you've got a random roommate... unless you're in a single. And there are several dorms with singles for freshmen. </p>
<p>This stuff will all become clearer in the next few months for matriculating students. And from what I can see, the process works very, very well.</p>
<p>Just adding a few thoughts -- </p>
<p>Housing is guaranteed all four years for MIT students, so there's no question of "knowing if" you will have a room -- you will have a room. Freshmen are additionally required to live on campus, while sophomores, juniors, and seniors may choose to move to a fraternity, sorority, or independent living group. Very few students move off-campus on their own (to an apartment).</p>
<p>I wrote a blog entry about dorm choice and the housing timeline [url=<a href="http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/residential_life_housing_options/home_on_the_range.shtml%5Dhere%5B/url">http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/residential_life_housing_options/home_on_the_range.shtml]here[/url</a>].</p>
<p>Videos are so awesome.</p>
<p>I think you can actually still access last year's I^3 videos... I believe this link works:
<a href="http://web.mit.edu/i3/baker/video/%5B/url%5D">http://web.mit.edu/i3/baker/video/</a>
You can look at the other videos by subsituting the dorm name where it says "baker". i.e., "new" or "next" or "eastcampus".</p>
<p>I still don't know what dorm I want to temp in, though!</p>
<p>You don't need to know yet. :) Many people tour dorms during CPW and decide which to rank in their top three, and many people don't know until the summer, when they have to send in the housing form.</p>
<p>I think it's important not to get too hung up on a single dorm during the initial lottery, because I think that discourages people from looking around to find a dorm that's really a good fit for them. So don't pick "a" temp dorm -- pick three or four.</p>
<p>Um, it is fairly hard to move from dorm to dorm. In my experience only 3 people moved into Baker (the most popular dorm that year) from other dorms, only 10 got into Burton Conner, etc. This is because, as other people said they won't kick you out if you want to stay, but they also have a bunch of triples in popular dorms that they need to decrowd before they'll let people from other dorms in.</p>
<p>So, yeah, you can pick a tentative dorm, but don't go about it as if you can just move, moving is still a lottery, and thus movement is not garunteed. I'm just saying this out of personal experience, I attempted to move around dorms during orientation, and failed, luckily I love where I live now so I'm glad the lottery didn't pick me. </p>
<p>This is why it's important to pref 2 or 3 dorms near the top you think you'll like so that you'll have a good chance of getting into at least one you can bear. I've heard weird stories like a kid prefing Baker number 1 and everything else tied for last, and then he ended up in Chocolate City (he was white, this is a pretty much all black dorm).</p>