TLDR: Apply ASAP for housing if you’re OK with a randomly-assigned roommate, otherwise read on.
I just noticed that the housing application for new residents is open, so I wanted to pass along some housing information that might be useful for new freshmen. (My daughter was a freshman for Fall 2017 – note that SJSU could change their procedures such that this post is no longer relevant.)
The housing application for Fall 2018 has opened before freshmen acceptances have been released, which is a change from last year. I’m pretty sure you can apply for housing before you’ve been accepted. There’s a $50 non-refundable application fee. You’ll also be asked to make an initial deposit (last year ours was $600). I believe the deposit is refundable, but check with the housing office to confirm.
Advice: If SJSU is your first choice and you’re willing to risk $50 before being admitted, apply for housing as soon as possible. You also need to pay the initial deposit for your application to be processed. However, see below for roommate information.
SJSU requires freshmen who live outside a 30-mile radius to live on campus their first year, assuming the school can accommodate everyone. Technically it’s not exactly 30 miles, there is a list of cities that are excluded from this requirement:
http://www.housing.sjsu.edu/housingaz/freshmanoncampushousing/
For Fall 2017, the school significantly underestimated the amount of frosh housing applications they would receive. Students who hadn’t applied for housing by the deadline were placed on a waiting list, even if they lived outside the 30-mile radius. Many of these kids were forced to find off-campus housing. Can’t really blame the school for that, although plenty of people would argue that the school admitted too many freshmen which led to the housing problem.
Advice: Apply for housing as soon as possible, and definitely before the deadline! For Fall 2018, the priority deadline is May 1. Again, see below for roommate information.
We live in one of the excluded cities but my daughter applied for housing on the day the application opened and fortunately she got a room. I still wonder whether she would have gotten a room if more of those kids who lived outside the 30-mile radius had applied on time.
If you are OK with a randomly-assigned roommate, go ahead and apply for housing right away. If you’re hoping to find and request a roommate, you should hold off on applying for housing, or you can complete the initial application but don’t pay the deposit yet.
The school does not provide any assistance in finding a roommate. Get on Facebook and look for a “San Jose State Class of 20XX” group for your graduation year, join the group (there may be more than one!), post a blurb about yourself, and start browsing for candidates.
Advice: You have to be proactive to find a roommate.
Requesting a roommate in the housing application does NOT guarantee that you will get that roommate. In order to request a roommate, you will need to know the other person’s “screen name” assigned to them by the housing application. One of you will add the other person in the application, and the other person will have to accept the request.
Advice: Once it looks like you’re committed enough to apply for housing at SJSU and you want to find a roommate, get on Facebook as soon as possible and try to find someone. Once you do find someone, make arrangements for both of you to pay your deposits on the SAME DAY. Note that your building and room preferences need to match.
My suspicion is that the housing assignments are done in batches, meaning they periodically process any new applications for which deposits have been paid. If this is true, applying for housing and paying the deposit on Day 1 and then updating your application on Day 50 to add a roommate request would have no effect because you’d have already been assigned housing in the interim, you just didn’t know it. This was probably the case with my daughter. Although she applied for housing on Day 1 in late March, she didn’t find and request a roommate until early May. We noticed in June that housing charges had been applied to her MySJSU account and assumed that meant she was getting a room. Then she checked with her intended roommate and found her roommate had been assigned to a different building. My daughter got a randomly-assigned roommate that she really likes so things worked out fine for her in the end, but it easily could have gone a different way.
Once you’re assigned a room, the housing office will not accept any change requests until two weeks after the semester starts. Given the housing demand, the chances of successfully changing rooms is probably pretty low anyway. We didn’t even bother to try.
Hopefully after reading this post you’ll be more informed than we were.
If anyone has questions I will try to answer them. We also found the Housing office to be pretty responsive to emails.