A series of unfortunate events

Now that the magical room draw season is approaching again, I wanted to share a few of my heartwarming experiences, and use them to semicoherently suggest some reforms in our process.

The summer before coming to Princeton, when I was basking in the same sense of blatant superiority that we all felt, I actually took note of one of the thousand windbag letters I received from the University. It contained only a few simple facts: the name of my roommate, my new phone number, and my "Residential College" — Butler. Cool.

Needless to say, the day I arrived, what I saw was a little shocking. Hmm, these buildings weren't featured in the campus tour, or among the pictures on the website, or even in "A Beautiful Mind." What I saw were bricks and waffles. Lots of 'em. And the best part of all was the view. A view of a big, beautiful construction site — what was later to become the Ellipse. Early the next morning, my roommate and I discovered two important facts: construction started every day at 8 a.m., and, more importantly, construction is loud.

So, what was there to do about this double-whammy? Pretty much nothing. We were simply unlucky to have been randomly put into Butler, and even more unlucky to then be randomly put into a room overlooking construction. Funny that we still had to pay the same amount in room and board as someone living in Blair or Hamilton. But hey, somebody had to live in that room, it was just us by virtue of misfortune.

After that and another year of deluxe, waffle-ceilinged doubles, flash-forward to sophomore room draw — we were finally getting out of Butler! Finally going to the mythical "non-crappy housing" we had seen when visiting our friends and during our one-nightstands.

Or so we thought. The draw schedule eventually came out to the delight of everyone except me and my group of friends. The away messages that day didn't exactly help: "WHO'S getting a good room next year??", "Yippee for draw!", "Glad I had sex with Adam Rockman" and so on, all with links to the page where draw times were posted. In contrast, we were magically slated for 3:05 p.m. on the last day of draw, 10 spots from dead last among upperclassmen. For our group of eight, that spelled doom; we were forced onto the waiting list, where we remained until August.

Upperclass room draw should have been the moment when the school made up for giving us shoddy accommodations before; it offered the administration the opportunity to compensate for the fact that the Residential Colleges are blatantly unequal. But they didn't care.

Fate, instead, was allowed to continue rubbing our faces in the dirt. Look, we all know somebody has to get the short end of the stick, whether it is the marathon walk to Forbes or the sheer idiocy of the Butler quad. But as long as we're going to have rules about what percentage of a building is allowed to be male, as long as we're going to pretend Witherspoon and Holder "really needed" renovation (the bathroom is on a different floor! Help me, Jesus!), then we should use upperclass draw as a chance to share that short stick. There should be rules; this is room draw, not Vietnam.

What I propose is a weighted lottery. We take all the sophomores from Butler and Forbes, as well as any others with legitimate gripes — such as having lived around construction — and double their chances of having a draw time in the first two days of the three-day-long rising junior draw. Thus, everyone still has some shot at a good draw time, but a clear edge is given to those who took the proverbial shaft for the first two years.

Was the experience of a sub-par Residential College traumatic? Of course not. Is my current, off-the-waiting-list housing intolerable? No, not at all. But nevertheless the existing system seems genuinely unfair: you can't possibly contend there is no difference in quality between Colleges, so why can't we make an effort to correct for that? This system is feasible and would not require much more effort, Mr. Housing Department Guy — and you still get to keep your beloved random number generator.

In a few weeks, I'll be drawing as a senior, already in the top part of upperclass draw. These changes won't help me. But there are others out there who still need our help. Let's do it for the children. Ed Reynolds is an economics major from New York City. He can be reached at ereynold@princeton.edu.