The End of Timestamps

Housing Office implements new room assignment policy

Santa Clara’s Housing Office has changed the application system for the 2020 to 2021 school year from timestamps to lottery in order to increase the efficiency of the process.

Gayle Bandy is the assistant director in Housing Communications and Billing and says that 95 percent of the applicants would fill out their application and their timestamp would be 7:00 to 7:05 a.m. 

“That gives you really false hope about you thinking that you have a really good timestamp when we already have 900 applications with similar timestamps,” Bandy said. “So we are going with something more obvious, and that is lottery.”

Under the timestamp system, students would fill out their application and based on their submission time, they would be assigned a timestamp to choose their room. 

The earlier the timestamp, the earlier a student was able to select a room.

If a student was in a group, each member’s submission time would be averaged and the result would be their timestamp.

This year, applicants will be able to fill out their application anytime during the appropriate period. 

If they want to return to the same community they are currently living in, they will have returner status and therefore will receive priority over non-returners. 

Then Housing will assign a lottery number to each student in order to determine their position in the order of room selection. 

If students are in a group, each member’s lottery number will be averaged and assigned to the group.

The Housing Department believes that this change in the system will increase the fairness of the process and give students less anxiety and false hope. Some students were unhappy that there would be no advantage in the lottery system with regards to when they fill out their application.

“[The lottery] makes sense, but also the kid who signs up 10 minutes before [the time period] closes is based on the same grounds as the kids who are really on top of it and are really gunning for a certain room,” sophmore Matthew Hesse said.

Other students felt more uncertain about where they might end up living with this new lottery system.

Sophmore Abhinit Kashikar thinks this new system will be more stressful given the ambiguity for students not returning to the community they are currently living in.

“Last year, we were all returners,” Kashikar said. “So we knew where we were more likely to end up. This one we have no idea and there might be a case that we do not get our first option, we might not get our second or third option either.”

The sophomore applications will open on Jan. 15 at 9:00 a.m., while the junior and senior application will open on Jan. 22 at 9:00 a.m. and both will close on Feb. 9 at 11:59 p.m.

Contact Nisha Shankar at nshankar@scu.edu or call (408) 554-4852.