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`The Brookwood apartment application process: for those who are looking for somewhere to live, this is all too familiar and all too frustrating.
For those of you who are not acquainted with the topic, allow me to explain. For all freshmen and sophomores, dorm rooms are guaranteed. For the hundreds of students remaining, however, there are only 200-some spots.
A lottery is done, they pick a number out of a box, and that number determines whether or not they get to live on campus.
The students who don’t want to wait to see if they can live on campus then must find a place to shack up elsewhere. In a few weeks a waiting list process takes place, in the Brookwood office, and the exact date is not known in advance so as to “make it fair” for everyone because it is a first come, first serve event.
An e-mail is sent campus-wide to let students know that it is time to get on the list. After students make it on the list they are supposed to wait until March to get the call that they have an apartment to live in.
There are limited open apartments available, and a deposit of first month’s rent is required to apply. When I went through this whole process I was told to check my mail at six a.m., every morning, until the e-mail was sent.
So I did. After a week of getting up at dawn the email was finally sent – an hour and a half late and on the same morning I was scheduled to register for spring classes. By the time I got the e-mail it was three hours too late. In the end, though, it didn’t matter anyway because as apparently students had been lined up overnight to get on the list for a few days.
In November, over thirty students were said to have camped out, overnight, in front of the office in order to get a high number on the waiting list. Seriously though? There has to be a better way.