Housing selection time: Best friends don’t always make best roommates

USA TODAY
College

We are in the home stretch. Spring is in the air, end of the year assignments and papers are piling up, and finals week looms. The time has come to choose where you are going to live next year. The whirlwind melodrama of housing selection often comes with turmoil, hysteria, confusion, and friendship casualties.

Many colleges and universities provide students with one option to speed along the process, assigning a random lottery number to students who wish to live on campus and using that as the way to set up a timeline for selection. Other schools run things a bit differently. They use the “priority point” system. Essentially, all students can earn a maximum of 36 points from five different categories: GPA, room damage, room condition, discipline, and campus involvement. Essentially, in order to get housing, you must join a few clubs, get good grades, stay out of trouble, and not leave your room looking like a grenade launcher was set off in there on a routine basis. Pretty simple right? Not so much.

While the system has its positives and negatives, the strain of accumulating the coveted priority points consumes the individual. For example, you have a group of great friends that you eat with everyday, party with every weekend, and BBM every five seconds. Then, that fateful day in February, you each receive your priority point report.

While you did alright, one of your ‘best friends’ got a low GPA, joined no clubs, and was written up twice, leaving her with horrible points. When computing your group average, it turns out she brings your group down from 31 points (not bad, but not great) to 27 points. You and your friends, desperate to get into the fabulous townhouses, drop her like a bad habit and kick her out of the group. She now is left alone and abandoned by her friends.

Whether your school employs a system like the priority points, or if you find yourself in an over-dramatic housing selection soap opera nightmare, here are some tips that help smooth over the process and relieve some stress: Read More

I'm Ron Denaro and thanks for joining College Campus Chatter today!

Ron Denaro is the president of College Campus Trips, a tour company providing high school students with tours of college campuses, nationwide. For more information, call (954) 567-5751 or e-mail: ron@collegecampustrips.com