DANIEL MOLINA AND ALLY HUTZLER

STAFF WRITER AND ASSISTANT EDITOR

The annual housing selection process will be held this week between Tuesday, April 28 and Thursday, April 30. However, this year’s housing lottery will be markedly different than in previous years.

Applying, choosing roommates and selecting a dorm will all be done through an online application that will allow the Office of Residence Life to handle this task more efficiently.

“We are very excited for these new changes,” Andrew Weingarten, director of residence life, said. “This new platform will allow us to save hours and hours of frustration, anger and fatigue sitting in Plato’s with lottery papers.”

The new format will allow the students to select their roommates if they have already paid the housing fee for next semester, have no holds in their accounts and have already registered for next semester’s courses.

After all those requirements are fulfilled, students will be able to choose their rooms based on the number of credits they have acquired until this semester. The more credits a student has, the better lottery number they will receive.

Sometime early this week, students will receive an email containing the time and date of their respective lottery time. At that time students will pick their room from all the possibilities displayed by the system, and that choice will also apply for all of their roommates or suitemates.

Formerly, students had to line up according to their lottery number in Thomas Hall.

“With the old system we were forced to wait in a huge line,” sophomore Brendan Convery said. “Although we were given a time we didn’t necessarily know exactly when our number would come up and if someone took longer than expected we all had to wait.”

Freshman, who don’t have the memories of waiting and worrying over housing in long lines,  are experiencing a less stressful housing process.

“This is my first time going through this process but the school is making it so easy,” freshman Shane Riordan said.  “The emails we get with all the steps we have to complete make it very manageable. It’s hard to believe that it was not like this the whole time.”

Housing selection may not be the only Manhattan College application process to move online. Weingarten said that in the future, Manhattan College may automate additional processes such as the move-in or break housing forms students typically fill out.