OIT issue delays room draw

Freshmen in Butler, Mathey and Whitman colleges scheduled to participate in room draw between 10:00 a.m. and noon on Thursday were unable to select a room due to “technical interruption of service” on the Housing Office website, according to an email sent by the Housing Office to freshmen whose draw times had to be rescheduled.

Students originally scheduled to draw today, in Wilson, Forbes and Rockefeller colleges, have been rescheduled to a future date. The draw will most likely be rescheduled for the week of April 16, the email said. Students will draw at the same assigned times on a different date.

University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua said in an email that the outage was caused by limited memory in the housing system. Once additional memory was installed, Mbugua explained, the problem was resolved and draw continued as normal by 12:30 p.m.

Students scheduled to draw during the technical difficulties had to resort to alternative methods to select their rooms. Some managed to draw their rooms over the phone with the Housing Office while others were forced to walk to New South Building to choose them manually.

When Samantha Lee ’15, a student in Mathey College whose draw time was 10:21 a.m. on Thursday, tried to log onto the housing website, a pop-up appeared explaining that the server was down and the page for room draw would not open. As she had an early draw time, she was able to handle the problem by phone with the Housing Office.

“I felt like that it was very unorganized, and they should have expected this, especially since I believe they have used this system years in the past,” she explained.

Hannah Park ’15 — tried to draw into Butler College less than half an hour after Lee tried at 10:45 a.m. — said she had to walk to New South to manually request a room.

“It was kind of crazy. There [were] a lot of people there — everybody on their computers,” she said. “The staff for the Housing Department became really stressed out,” she noted.

There was only greater confusion when the room draw website was restored while many students were still gathered at New South.

“By the time we chose our room [manually], the site came back up, so then everybody was panicking and everyone was trying to log in themselves to grab rooms,” she said.

Park said that many students felt that the Housing Office should have delayed Thursday’s room draw rather than resuming the already- interrupted draw during the same day.

However, Mbugua said that the Housing Office is working to preserve the “integrity of room draw.”

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“Housing staff are carefully analyzing the selections made electronically and manually throughout the day to ensure that the integrity of the draw was maintained,” he said. “Student concerns related to the outage will continue to be addressed on a case-by-case basis,” he added.

Students will also have the same choice of rooms in mid-April as they would have if they were to draw today, he explained.

“The rooms available for those students will remain the same because they are different from the rooms in the upper class room draw, which is expected to start as scheduled on Tuesday, April 3,” he said.

Correction: Due to a reporting error, the original version of this article incorrectly stated the names of the colleges that suffered technical difficulties. In fact, students were unable to draw into Butler, Mathey and Whitman colleges. The 'Prince' regrets the error.