New housing selection system will abolish community living

This January, the housing selection process for college houses will undergo a makeover.

Under a new online platform — My Home at Penn which is set to launch on Dec. 5 — community living will be entirely eliminated. Students will form groups of one to four students and submit their applications together under the name of a group captain. However, larger groups of students will still be able to communicate with each other when self-selecting their rooms.

Previously, the community living program allowed groups between six and eight students to apply to live on the same floor of a college house.

The new function will not apply to those enrolling in residential programs.

While many of the college houses currently have individualized point systems to grant priority to certain students, the point system will now be standardized across all houses. Students can gain points from having lived in the house previously, participating in activities like House Council, working at the house’s cafe and writing an essay about their contributions to the community along with their housing application.

Each group will be given a time slot to select their rooms based on the point system.

The process will now be “easier and more consistent across the houses,” said Ellie Rupsis, associate director for Housing Administration.

A strict one-to-one ratio will also be implemented, meaning that each student living in a certain college house can only pull one other non-resident into the building for the next year.

The residential program process will start on Jan. 11 next year, the in-house process on Feb. 3 and the inter-house process on Feb. 24.

The in-house processes for Dubois, Gregory and Stouffer college houses, however, will take place at the same time as the residential program process for other buildings.

Those buildings “don’t create artificial distinctions between residential programs and those who want to live in the building,” Executive Director of College Houses & Academic Services Martin Redman said. “Students get to know each other in a very different way than they do in a high rise.”

Residential Services received student feedback and worked with focus groups to develop this new system, which was tested out over the summer. They also worked with the Undergraduate Assembly and Residential Advisory Board.

RAB “test-ran a few housing applications on the new system” and “told [Residential Services] what was clear and what was confusing,” RAB Chairman and College senior John Gee wrote in an email.

“We found that the new system worked pretty well,” UA member and College sophomore Jenny Xia said. She added that while she “personally liked the system,” she wants to incorporate student feedback to improve the program in the future.

“I’m sure there will be some tinkering that occurs with the process after we see how this actually works,” Redman said.

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