Room assignment done already??!!

<p>ohh i forgot...all internationals are losers...'cause we form the majority amongst people paying 50K per year....</p>

<p>I'm not actually sure about the thing with paying full cost...</p>

<p>Anyways, international students are a very important part of CMU. There's a bunch of international students who are active in various campus organizations, like south asian student association.</p>

<p>Maybe your letter got lost in the mail or something, dexter? What is your major? Tobi is in a different situation because he's not an incoming freshman.</p>

<p>Who said internationals are losers? We're not losers...</p>

<p>well, it seems that u said it, havaldaar...</p>

<p>Oh right...
I didn't mean it of course being an intel myself. By the way, as KrazyKow said its not just intels who are lagging behind on correspondence.</p>

<p>Apparently my housing assignment stuff's already been sent, but the on the site it's still mentioned as pending.</p>

<p>I'm under the impression that Hammerschlag is never a first choice dorming area, because of how it is structured gender-wise..</p>

<p>yeah...but then again you get kids in hamerschlag who r all in the same situation, so it doesn't even really matter. it's not like an all guy dorm will prevent you from bringing girls back to ur room</p>

<p>prime triple morewood. it seems alot of people are getting primes.</p>

<p>I just got this email from the housing people. Just thought it may be useful to some of you</p>

<p>Dear Can,</p>

<p>I have checked our files, you are assigned to Housing TBA. We make dorm assignments based on the date of the Admissions deposit, not on the date that the housing forms were received. Your deposit date, 5/2/06, is relatively late compared to the other incoming freshmen. As a result, by the time we got to you, all the dorms were filled up. Between now and the start of orientation, however, we will continue to move students from housing TBA to an actual dorm room that we opened up. So by the start of the school year, only about 50 or so of the 300 current Housing TBA students will be assigned temporary housing for a couple of weeks into the semester until we find permanent housing for them. From your deposit date, it is highly unlikely that you will be one of the 50 temporary housing students. You will immediately if we make an assignment for you and take you off the Housing TBA list. If you have any other questions please feel free to contact us.</p>

<p>Did that e-mail go to your CMU e-mail address?</p>

<p>yep but i sent them an email first. I basically asked what my assignment is.</p>

<p>why do we need to have temp housing....</p>

<p>we pay 40k a year to this place yet may be living in a converted common room or stuffed into an already full dorm room. it is so stupid that CMU does not have enough room for all the students that enrolled</p>

<p>tba students~ i got an e-mail from housing services officer that they are working hard to put everyone whose deposit was received my cmu before may 4.. cmu got my deposit on may 3rd, and they said that i'll know if i'll get a temporary housing or not in first week of august.</p>

<p>Lbtg47 - look at CMU's campus map and tell me where they can build a dorm. CMU is under space pressure already because of the torn down buildings that are making space for the Gates building. It's not very logical for CMU to build a new dorm to house a 50 students for a month or less when space will open up once people move to greek housing.</p>

<p>Also, I know that it was a record year for applications, and more competitive than ever at top schools. It's possible that CMU got a higher yield than usual because of MIT/Stanford rejects in CS and whatnot. They can't predict things perfectly.</p>

<p>I'm not intending to be rude, and temporary housing is a bummer, but the alternative is rejecting more people. There's many things wrong with the housing department, but this is one thing they can't do much about.</p>

<p>well would it not make sense to reject any students the school cannot accomodate? isnt that normally how a school determines how many people it should accept...</p>

<p>and im sure with all those smart math nerds at CMU they can at least figure out how to admit the right amount of people so everyone has a place to live... why not live by 'better safe than sorry' and reject more people so there may be some empty rooms but everyone has a proper place to live? oh wait nevermind, that would mean the school gets less money..</p>

<p>hell, why not admit everyone who applies and let people start camping on the lawns....</p>

<p>well when you have the number that are appying 50 students really isnt a whole lot.</p>

<p>Also, CMU was not expecting the number of kids who enrolled to enroll.</p>

<p>Numbers arn't right but this is how the math works. If CMU needs 1000 kids and it normally loses 500 to other colleges then it will accept 1500 kids. What happend is that alot more of these extra kids decided to apply. Hence, we get some extra kids.</p>

<p>Should they have extra dorms, prlly. But predicting the number of kids who are gonna enroll is like knowledgably predicting the stock market over and over again. It's just hard to do.</p>

<p>yes, but maybe they should only be accepting 1200 kids and have some extra dorms left to be safe. the model they use tries to squeeze every penny out of an incoming class and as a result mistakes like this happen.</p>

<p>certainly arguable</p>

<p>on the other hand, like you said, gotta hustle all that $$ lol</p>

<p>Don't get me wrong, I am just asking because I dont know.</p>

<p>Why are the assignments taking this long? I honestly dont understand what they mean when they say "we are working hard to get people who paid before may 4 a dorm"? What are they doing?</p>

<p>As I said, please please dont take it as I am looking down on them. I simply dont know the procedure and want to know what it is that consumes so much of their time.</p>

<p>My guest guess is that they are waiting for something to happen before they start, from they left off, assigning the dorms. But what is that thing then?</p>

<p>Housing in Pittsburgh is fairly cheap, so many upperclassmen choose to live outside of CMU's housing because it's cheaper (this isn't the case for schools in expensive places like Cambridge). Also, living outside of CMU's housing you can have a place to live in the summer, get a house (though there are actually some houses that CMU owns), and/or live with people of the opposite sex. However, sometimes it takes a bit of time and work to find non-CMU housing.</p>

<p>Room draw is this crazy thing where upperclassmen pick their room. Everyone gets a randomly assigned number, and people pick rooms in order of their numbers (juniors first, then sophomores, then freshmen). If you have a roommate you want, you get to use the better number of the two, so often upperclassmen will get rooms with freshmen so the freshmen get better rooms than they could otherwise. Because the housing deposits are due after room draw (many people decide if they want CMU housing based on their room draw luck), a bunch of upperclassmen bail out of their housing contracts, leaving the freshmen (will be sophomores) in good rooms with missing roommates. In room draw, you actually pick your room, not just your dorm, so CMU can't actually move any upperclassmen around to make completely empty rooms. CMU likes to house freshmen with freshmen as much as possible for social reasons (this is good for everyone involved). To complicate matters, there are waitlists since not everyone gets the dorm they want in room draw, and there are plenty of people who put down housing deposits and then find apartments during the summer and bail on their contracts. As a result, CMU can't count on upperclassmen actually inhabiting the rooms they put down deposits on, so they wait until as late as they can to do final room assignments.</p>

<p>The on campus rooms go much faster during room draw than the off campus Oakland apartments, so if there are any empty rooms at the end of room draw, they are off campus. CMU wants to put freshmen on campus, which means that except for the freshmen only areas and any rooms that CMU reserves for freshmen, there are no spots for freshmen on campus after room draw. Spots always open up, though, because of people breaking contracts. If CMU reserved enough on campus spots for all the freshmen, they upperclassmen who want to live on campus would be forced into apartments, and then empty rooms would open on campus with no one to live in them except waitlisted people, and waitlists are messy things. Everything is further complicated by CMU's guarantee to house undergrads as long as they don't leave the system.</p>

<p>I've heard that sometimes if there's enough of a housing shortage, CMU tries to pay upperclassmen to leave their housing so they can stick freshmen in the vacated space. Upperclassmen actually received their housing packets in the mail a bit after the freshmen, and mine said I was roomming with myself (even though I know I signed up for a room with a friend of mine).</p>

<p>I hope this makes a bit of sense and explains some of why CMU's housing system is so broken. They can't really fix it, because most of the problem is students that abuse the system.</p>