New Housing Selection Process Allows Class of 2029 to Choose Roommates

Addison Winship ’29

Contributing Writer

An incoming first-year student must complete many tasks in their Starting Out Portal, one of which being housing selection. The housing selection system for first-year students at Trinity College has changed in various ways over the last few years. Housing operations fall under the Housing Team, a subdivision of the Bantam Network, which is currently led by Associate Director for Residence Education and Student Engagement Migdalia Crespo and Residential Learning Coordinator Malachi Marzolf.  

The first-year residence halls are Cook A, Jones, Elton, Smith, Trinity, Jackson and Funston. Within these residence halls, first-years can choose their room from a selection of singles, one-room doubles, two-room doubles and quads.  

One of the changes that has been made recently is the use of a system known as eRez life. Staff answered many of the Tripod’s questions regarding this system, as well as other aspects of the housing process. The housing team explained that “eRezLife is a housing software system that was implemented in 2023. This includes student access to housing contracts, housing selection process, roommate selection and important forms.” 

The most recent change was the decision to allow first-years to choose their own roommates on eRezLife. When asked why this change was made, the Housing Team stated that “Processes in a college environment are continuously changing, and we wanted to try a new approach to best serve the needs of incoming students.” Prior to this, roommates were decided by the housing team while taking students’ responses to a housing survey into consideration.  

Once a student has filled out their housing contract, they can create a roommate profile on eRezLife by answering personal questions regarding sleep habits, room dynamics and social life. In the search for a roommate, students can filter and browse other roommate profiles based on their preferred criteria and then add other students to their roommate group. Each student within a roommate group is given a time slot for housing selection, and the student with the earliest time slot becomes the group leader, taking charge of entering the system and picking a room for the whole group. Before housing selection began, students could browse all the rooms in the first-year residence halls and add them to their “shopping cart.” When their time slot began, they would sign back in and see what was still available in the cart.  

For the Class of 2029, the housing selection process took place between July 9-11. Only hours after the process began on July 9, all 46 of the first-year quads had been filled. Many roommate groups with later time slots aspiring to live in a quad had to split into two separate two-room doubles. Due to the yield rate for the Class of 2029 resulting in a smaller class, many students without roommates are in double placements as singles, meaning they have a larger than average living space for a first-year student. The housing team is currently unsure of how the process will look in the future, stating, “We continue to collect data points that will inform our process for next year.”