Most students on campus can commiserate with the stress of finding suitable housing on campus. However, as a rising sophomore last year, I didn’t know what turmoil would arise. During my first experience with the housing lottery, I bounced from unknown to unknown regarding who my roommates would be, how many there would be and where we would live. In total I went through five different combinations, finally landing a two-person dorm room in Spradley-Young. I was content for the next two months, thinking my housing situation was settled. 

This changed in late June,  after the lottery had ended, when I received an email from ResLife statingy that “due to some unforeseen circumstances, we will be closing Spradley-Young for the 2025-26 academic year.” I was quite disoriented after leaping from plan to plan for where I would live, only to get the rug pulled out from under me. What made me more upset was that there was no reasoning given beyond the vague circumstances. If I were given any tangible reason I was being relocated, I would have felt more at ease. It would have been one less unknown in this equation. I was additionally told in a follow-up that, “nothing has happened to the building, we simply will not be using it this year,” which was very confusing. 

An added layer to the sudden announcement was that this took place during the switch to the new housing software. This meant that it would be impossible for me to learn if any update had occurred, and that ResLife would be unable to make any new changes. This left me in limbo until late July, when I was finally assigned somewhere to live, and I have been living there nicely since move-in day. 

I think this situation could have been handled differently. This notification coinciding with the software change made it very difficult to navigate the circumstance. The announcement was timed very poorly, and I could have been given notification sooner  to when a solution would be determined. A major problem I found was the long uncertainty. There was no information to really act on or put me at ease, so it was quite, literally, unsettling. If something like this happens again to students, I can only hope these two shortcomings will not occur.