New Roompicks IHC Announcement

The new system for room picks has officially been implemented, and all of the information is available online, along with a full schedule. The important changes are as follows. The lottery for summer housing is happening first. This is the same process as previous years.

Afterwards, we will begin the fall housing lottery. The first big change is that after releasing the school-wide lottery numbers, the houses will go first. This is before unaffiliated residences choose their rooms. Another change is that the houses are now able to send six people to Marks and Braun. You may pick into a Marks/Braun room like you can any other room in your house. There is no guarantee that houses will get three rooms next to each other, but you are guaranteed a spot in Marks/Braun when that lottery happens later.

Once the houses are finished, people who did not get a room in their houses will go into the Bechtel lottery. Here, preference will be given to unaffiliated students. Suites with a higher percentage of unaffiliated students will get a room first. Finally, Marks and Braun will choose. Now, the lottery is done completely randomly, regardless of affiliation status.

To be fully transparent, we understand that this is still a very imperfect process. The issues began with the over-enrollment due to extremely high yield, so housing is no longer guaranteed. Our goal is to pick rooms earlier so students who need off-campus housing can start looking for it earlier. We also hope that adding Marks/Braun rooms for the houses will lead to less saturation of the pool of unaffiliated students. That being said, there is nothing that will fix the fact that we no longer have guaranteed housing, and these are not huge changes. Realistically, this year is more of a test of some new protocols that will hopefully make things run more smoothly once enrollment is down. So I apologize to those who will not get their desired housing. This year will be difficult, but we think we can make this better for the future if you bear with us.

Sincerely,
Evan Portnoi
ASCIT Vice President of Non-Academic Affairs

More info on Fall Lottery Process: https://housing.caltech.edu/undergrads/housing-contract-lottery/undergrad-lottery-process