Williams Housing

In tromping all over campus yesterday, checking out various housing options, it occurred to me that we unappreciated how great our housing situation is at Williams. While our dorms our completely unsuited to any sort of organization, they do have wonderful rooms.

Think about it: our freshmen get to live in mostly single rooms, and sophomore doubles are almost always of a fair size. Juniors and Seniors get promised singles (and most students only have a roommate one year), as well as gorgeous houses.

We don't live in towers, and we don't live in triples or quads. We're pretty blessed by the situation, and in visiting Milham, Doughty, Chadbourne, Woodbridge, Lambert, and Susie over the past two days, I saw just how great the Cream-of-the-Crop is. Milham: beautiful, especially the mantelpieces. Susie: luxuriously large. Woodbridge: a true home. Lambert: a small house with big rooms. Doughty: just plain old gorgeous, with a piano in the huge common room. Chadbourne: cozy, with a great location. While I'm so so so grateful for my great pick #, I'm also glad to have been able to live in all of my rooms on campus. I lucked out.

Now, if I was only able to clean the room I have now.....


EDIT @ 3:11 PM (partially for Ephblog visitors)

It would be an understatement to say that the co-op draw had a few more people entering than beds. I don't think Williams will ever be able to really satisfy the demand. You can see on the co-op page that there are at least 52 groups in the draw, and that group 21 has 130ish people in front of it, so you can do the math.

Because the final few rooms in a co-op aren't usually so big, the most important factor when picking into them are one's housemates. So in that sense, there's a self-correcting mechanism to make sure that the 2 people ending up in Milham are compatible with the 7 who are picking in. (and indeed, that will be the case this year)

I'm also amazed at how even the people in group 8 are going to be forced to choose between poker and doubles, if everything works out as I expect. These are a small number of small houses.