Oh, hey! Welcome to the community!

Do you love to pick your own seat on the airplane? I sure do! I love the ability to control where I’m sitting and what part of the plane I am on. I don’t always have the opportunity to select my seat, but when I do, I feel so much more in control. So, let’s think about the impact of that experience when we think about the experience that students have with regards to their residence room assignment. How meaningful would it be to have a sense of control when it comes to residence room selection? 

The Research

Last month, we summarized the impact of selecting your roommate on campus satisfaction in a blog post on Roommate Selection and Satisfaction. The ACUHO-I foundation study highlights that giving students autonomy and choice in their roommates results in positive outcomes. In addition to that study, Skyfactor produced a research note that suggests “on-campus residents [are] more likely to report high satisfaction with the outcomes of the room assignment process than aspects of the process itself.” Where the impact of assignment really made a difference was in terms of their Hall Environment Satisfaction. Those who were satisfied with their room assignment reported higher satisfaction with the ability to sleep and study in their room and higher satisfaction with the noise level in the community.

Experience Matters

Giving students control of their assignments may be great for the students, but what does that mean for staff? Saint Mary’s College uses online for all of their assignments, and their process was highlighted in a campus showcase blog recently. As a campus that has been utilizing online room selection for over seven years, the blog focuses on how their system works and the impact on staff.

It can be overwhelming or intimidating to consider a move to online room selection. We can appreciate that you may see the value of online room selection, but you need to convince stakeholders of the value. We asked a few of our community members to give their top three reasons for moving to an online room selection. Here are their thoughts:

Monique E. Hankerson, Associate Director of Housing Services, Occidental College:

1. The elimination of antiquated processes. The use of software such as eRezLife is essential for Occidental. We were utilizing several applications to complete our housing processes, and having a user-friendly software to help us centralize our systems has been essential to the increased customer service satisfaction of our students. 
2. Reliability. Students thrive best when systems are located in one area and are consistently available. eRezLife has been a reliable source of information for our students. The resources and bulletins section is updated frequently with important information and has become a reliable hub for students.
3. Convenience.

Ezequiel Delgado-Cervantes, Housing Coordinator, University of Portland:

1. Easy to use. Both students and staff spoke highly about how easily students could search and select rooms, choose their own meal plans, and find roommates using RoomeeZ.
2. Less time-intensive & stressful. Our previous in-person process took hours of staff and student’s schedules, but thanks to online selection, students were able to select a room in under 10 minutes.
3. Great support from eRezLife. In every step leading to our housing selection, eRezLife staff was friendly, patient, and helpful in guiding me in setting up all the settings so students would be able to have a successful housing selection.

Troy Schillinger, Operations Coordinator, Hamline University:

1. Ease of access for students. I have found that moving to an online process for students to select their room has been extremely well-received from students. They are able to access eRezLife and the room selection process from anywhere – there’s no pressure to be on-campus or in the main residential life office, etc. (#socialdistancing). Additionally, going digital means less paper and creating a more sustainable office!
2. Giving autonomy and ownership to students. Giving students the opportunity to select their own spaces provides students with more buy-in, ownership, and excitement for their space. Having students self-select their own space promotes individual decision-making for students as well.
3. An easy and fun process for housing staff. Yes – there is work that needs to be put into the front end, but it’s manageable and within the staff’s control. And once the lottery begins, I felt like I could sit back and relax while watching spaces on campus fill up.

Taking the Leap

It can be a bit scary to throw your traditional assignment process out of the window and adopt an online room selection process. Remember that you don’t need to move all of your processes at the onset. Perhaps start with offering online room selection to your upper-class students and continue to assign your first-year students. If you’re an eRezLife community member, Troy encourages you to “utilize an eRezLife Training site before making any changes!” He also adds, “I am typically a cautious person when it comes to changes to a particular process, so being able to make changes and see how they turn out in an environment where you can afford to make mistakes has certainly put my mind at ease!” 

If you’d like to talk about what’s involved with making the shift to online room selection, please don’t hesitate to be in touch. We’d be happy to chat with you or connect you with another community member who has been through the transition to online selection.

Welcome to the community. We’re glad you’re here.

Tags: housing, occupancy, occupancy management, online room selection, Residence Life, studen affairs