Students who drew rooms in New College West (NCW) on Monday will have to do it all over again.
According to an email from Housing and Real Estate Services sent to the NCW community on Monday at about 9 p.m., the My Housing portal inaccurately displayed room availability, preventing some students from selecting rooms in Kanji Hall. To ensure that room draw is “equitable and fair,” NCW room selections were “canceled” and a new room draw will occur on Wednesday, March 27 and Thursday, March 28, wrote Angie Rooney, the Associate Director of Housing and Real Estate Services. Students will keep their assigned draw times, which were originally scheduled for Monday and Tuesday.
“We understand that redoing the NCW draw may be stressful,” Rooney wrote. “Our aim is to support a successful 2024-25 academic year for the NCW community, and we believe that these measures are the best option for achieving that goal.”
As students noticed discrepancies between the live Available Rooms List and the options presented in My Housing on Monday, they began to contact Housing and Real Estate Services for assistance.
“We determined through our findings that the system did not properly recognize the name change of Kanji Hall, and thus the rooms in Kanji Hall were not shown as available,” Rooney explained in the email.
According to NCW resident Ricky Chen ’27, the Available Rooms List displayed the available singles and rooms in Kanji, but when he logged into My Housing on Monday at about 2:30 p.m., there were few Kanji singles available for selection.
“We figured out eventually that the system completely crashed right before [we drew], and then when it rebooted, none of the rooms in Kanji hall were able to be selected,” Chen told The Daily Princetonian. Chen had hoped to select a single or a Jack-and-Jill style double. He and his friend ended up selecting one of the few doubles that appeared on the site.
At about 8:00 p.m. that evening, NCW resident Amanda Hugas ’27 and her draw group met to review the available rooms list in preparation for the second day of the NCW room draw on Tuesday. The singles in Kanji Hall that were unavailable on the housing portal earlier in the day were listed on the Available Rooms List, she said.
“We [were] freaking out, because we’re thinking this is good luck,” Hugas told the ‘Prince,’ referring to the abundance of available singles. “We [were] like, ‘Oh my god, how has no one taken all of these singles?’ We didn’t know what happened earlier.”
An hour later, Rooney sent the email about the technical difficulties and announced the cancellation of NCW room draw selections.
According to Hugas, Kanji Hall, along with Addy Hall, is a popular choice among NCW residents because of its proximity to the dining hall and the main section of campus.
“I’m glad that they’re doing a redraw to make it fair,” Chen said.
Elisabeth Stewart is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince.’
Please send corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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