As the weather gets warmer, Princeton undergraduates become infected with spring fever, a mix of excitement at finally seeing leaves on trees and anxiety about dealing with midterm exams. Spring brings more stress to students than just exams, though, as freshmen, sophomores and juniors tackle the challenges of room draw.
The Princeton Room Draw Guide (RDG), launched this week, is meant to eliminate some of the pressure and confusion of room draw. Located at rooms.princeton.edu, the site is a searchable database of dorm rooms in the University's more than 40 undergraduate residential buildings.
RDG was created by juniors Blake Dixon, Avi Flamholz, Lester Mackey and Kay Ashaolu in the spring of 2005 as a final project for COS 333: Advanced Programming Techniques. Point, the student web portal, was created by COS 333 students in 2004.
The guide's goal is to make room draw information more accessible to the student body and to collect housing information not provided on the Housing Department's website, Flamholz said. "The idea is to have a searchable database, unlike the one on Housing's site, which is Excel files [and PDFs], with reviews and photos from students."
Today is the deadline to submit applications for room draw, and draw times for upperclass housing will be posted during spring break. Residential college draw times will be posted in early April and room draw will be held in April.
Though room draw is not yet in full swing, the site has already attracted a significant amount of attention from students, Flamholz said.
Since the site's official launch on Monday, more than 800 different users have logged onto the site and about 40 students have posted reviews. "It's almost a quarter of all the [undergraduate] students. That's pretty good considering that it hadn't really been advertised until today."
The Housing Department initially resisted providing data for the site, citing concerns that students would abuse the photo and review posting functions on the site, putting up inappropriate information, Flamholz said. "My sense was that this was just an excuse because they didn't feel comfortable giving us data, especially since it seems like they don't have all the data we asked for."
RDG is hosted on the same USG-owned Mac Mini server as Point.
All data were entered manually from housing files and include any mistakes that have been perpetuated in the department's files. But because students know their rooms, they can point out flaws in Housing's data in addition to rating their rooms.
Susan Williams '06 wrote a review of her room, 81 Patton Hall, after noticing someone next to her who was writing a review of his room. "I thought it would be good to explain some of the strengths and weaknesses of my room," she said. The review of her three-room triple includes complaints about the noisy parking lot outside the bedroom windows.
One review of 24 Buyers Hall notes that the room is "a very nice, relatively spacious bi-level quad."
It explains that having the two bedrooms upstairs and the common room downstairs "[allows] for an unusual degree of privacy." The review also mentions that the room includes "unique features" like a built-in bookshelf and a plaque in memory of an alumnus who lived in the dorm and died in World War I.
More changes are in the works for the site, Flamholz said. Search results will soon indicate which rooms have reviews and which don't.
Capabilities to post pictures will be launched in the next few weeks, as will room information about University-owned graduate student housing.
In the long term, Flamholz added, he will add capabilities to save searches and create bookmarks.
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