The University's move to conduct this year's entire room draw process online is being met with general praise. Room draw is still a little over three weeks away, but students who have used the website to sign up for draw groups said it was both easy to use and informative.
Jonathan Carroll '09 said he had not yet used the website, but a member of his draw group had showed him parts of it. He praised the website as "better than the old system" and "more convenient," with "really cool features."
Instead of reporting to a particular building at a specified time to choose their rooms, students will now log on to the Housing Department's room draw website. The site also contains blueprints of every dormitory and a spreadsheet detailing the order in which every room was drawn last year, among other things.
Undergraduate residence committee chair Caitlin Higgins '07 said the shift was a move of convenience. "The paper [room draw] process is time consuming for the Housing Department and stressful for students," she said in an email. "Making the process available online allows students to be anywhere when they sign up for their room."
Students panned the old paper system as hectic and confusing.
"There were so many people," Monique Roberts '09 said. "There were people looking at the wall [where the list of available rooms was posted], other people crossing off rooms. There were just a lot of people trying to have access to a limited thing."
USG president Rob Biederman '08 said the change was convenient and overdue.
"I'm thrilled that now you can sit at your computer and look at the room draw guide and room list and have [AOL Instant Messenger] open instead of having to run across campus trying not to miss class," Biederman said. "I wondered over the last two years why it wasn't like it is now."
Avi Flamholz '07, one of four COS 333: Advanced Programming Techniques students who designed the USG's online room draw guide last year, said that technological constraints did not explain the time taken for the website's development.
"Making a website tends to be a not very difficult task in the realm of things you might do with a computer," he said. Flamholz is also a columnist for The Daily Princetonian.
"It's hard to get institutions to make websites," he added. "They have to pay people to do it or do it themselves."
Higgins said the website has undergone lengthy testing and has long been in the works.
"The Housing Department spent a long time looking at online room draw at other schools (like Stanford) to make sure the system was topnotch," she said.
Higgins said she is "not at all worried" about the system functioning smoothly during room draw.
"[The online system] sounds like an improvement," Flamholz said, though he added that "room draw was never so terrible of a process that it needed to be done again."
"For me, it was 15 minutes of my life, though it's nice not to have to miss class [anymore] for it," he added. "I just hope that it works out; I don't see why it wouldn't.
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