For the first time at Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC)’s McMahon Hall, the residential housing lottery will be conducted online. The new process, which the Office of Residential Life (ResLife) hopes will be more efficient and convenient than the previous system, was used last year at Fordham College at Rose Hill (FCRH).

While ResLife is still sorting out the details on the various deadlines for registering, they are confident that the new system will be easier for students with busy lives, according to Housing Operations Assistant Michelle Costantino. To advertise these coming changes, ResLife is using the slogan, “One Click Away.”

“We want to emphasize the efficiency and that we’re meeting students’ needs,” Costantino said. “Nowadays everybody is in internships and classes and has so many other needs.”

The major change this year will be taking a process that required residents to be physically present at the lottery and making it accessible to those with busier schedules.

“In past years, it’s always been that all these people are coming into one room and hoping to get their apartment,” Costantino said, “but we’re hoping that online is going to be a lot easier to do it from their apartments, from class, wherever is most convenient.”

To make the process more convenient, ResLife will be making a change to the role of groups in the housing lottery. Instead of requiring all members of a group who wish to live together be present at the lottery, or at least to have all the members’ IDs with one person, there will be group leaders in charge of going online at the designated time and picking the room.

Costantino assures residents that the group leader will be responsible for representing the wishes of the whole group, not just one person. “There is one prime person, but it’s a group that everyone is in accordance with,” Costantino said.

Katie Howe, FCRH ’13, participated in Rose Hill’s online housing lottery last year and experienced a mostly painless process.

“Everyone was able to do it,” Howe said. “It was a lot easier than going to the lounge and picking a room off a board. It wasn’t like everyone in your grade in one room. The program didn’t freeze or anything, which was impressive.”

According to Howe, only one thing could have been better. One of the residence halls filled up faster than it normally would have, mainly because of the new way of ranking groups.

“All the groups went on the lowest person’s lottery number instead of averaging it like they were supposed to,” Howe said. “My friends were supposed to get a four [-person suite], but those all went so they got a six instead.”

According to Costantino, this is because the system is designed to benefit residents based on class priority. The new process takes a group’s lowest lottery number and uses that to decide the group’s rank, allowing all members of a class to have the equal chance of getting their desired room as anyone else in that class (i.e. rising seniors vs. rising seniors).

One other new aspect this year is that students currently studying abroad will be able to join a group from their current locations without needing a student to fill in as a proxy like they do now.

Although FCLC’s ResLife is still determining exactly how the lottery system will rank groups, most aspects of the process will remain unchanged. Under the new system, current McMahon residents will still pay the mandatory $200 housing deposit first, sometime in late February, and the lottery will still be open only to current residents. Non-freshmen will again be able to retain their rooms with three-fourths of the current roommates.

Student reaction has been mixed, as Jeffrey Cipriano, FCLC ’14, explained. Since he always heard fellow residents describe the old lottery process as “inconvenient, obnoxious and a hassle,” Cipriano welcomes the new process.

“I think it’s important that the seniors have more flexibility with housing,” Cipriano said. “They’ve lived here so long; they should have preference. At the same time, there’s such a limited space here that it can be problematic when sophomores are forced to live together [when they can’t get the room they wanted].”

ResLife will release further details later this month and offer information sessions to help ease the transition to the online housing lottery.

“We are encouraging as many students to come as possible,” Costantino said, “just because it is a new process, and we want everyone to be familiar with what to do.”