Room Draw Room Draw Revolution

I haven't posted in a while because we had Spring Break and then I realized the week after that it was Room Draw Season.

For those unfamiliar with the term, Room Draw is the process by which Mudders obtain rooms for the next school year. It's also one of the most stressful parts of the year. You see, we Mudders are not competitive people. Teachers don't grade on a curve, so you don't have to beat your fellow students to get a good grade--you just have to do well. The same cannot be said of Room Draw. There are, in fact, a finite number of rooms on campus. This means that if you get the room you want, you're keeping someone else from getting the room they want. This is especially true of singles, which are the most coveted rooms on campus due to their one-person occupancy. Through a strange series of events (which started when the person I'd been planning to room with decided to room with someone else and ended when, after the 4th person I wanted to room with said she'd be leaving Mudd, a rising senior decided to pull me into a single), I have an East single for next year. This is pretty unusual, because I'll only be a sophomore next year. There were some juniors who were upset about it, because they wanted to live in an East single next year and now won't be able to. They'll be over it pretty soon, but there was quite a lot of tension over it for a week or so. Also, because of the way Room Draw works, I already have a room, but most of my friends don't. (Rising seniors pick rooms first, then rising juniors, then rising sophomores.) I'm not worried about most of them, but there are a few who are picking rooms late (room draw order is decided randomly) who may wind up living in a dorm that really doesn't match them. Everything should turn out okay, though.

In case anyone is wondering, the typical Mudd housing cycle looks like this:
Freshmen live in every dorm on campus. They're assigned rooms based on the personality of the dorm or suite they'll be living in. With a few exceptions, freshmen have doubles. (A few have triples, but the freshman triples have about as much space per person as a typical Mudd double. A few others live in singles in South.)
After freshman year, you pick your own room. Because there are limited quantities of nicer rooms, this is what usually happens:
Sophomores generally live in doubles. A few choose to live in triples or quads, because triples and quads have more space per person than the average Mudd double. (The tradeoff is that, if you live in a triple or a quad, you have 2 or 3 roommates, instead of just one.) Sophomore rooms and freshman rooms are about the same size. (My situation is unusual, and is the result of Eastie folks being nice. All of my other friends will be living in doubles. One will be probably be living in the same room she's living in this year.)
About one-third of juniors live in singles. The rest live in doubles. Because juniors pick rooms before sophomores, many juniors usually wind up living in larger doubles than sophomores and freshman. (For example, "L doubles" and "long doubles," normally inhabited by juniors, have about as much floor space as 2 singles. Some inhabitants of long doubles and L doubles put up curtains that effectively turn the double into 2 singles.)
Almost all seniors live in singles, because there are about 200 singles on campus and about 170 people in any given senior class.

My E4 group is building a compost sifter for Pitzer for our final project. We'll probably be prototyping in a few weeks, so there's a good chance I won't be updating then. After all, prototyping is the part of the design process in which you and your friends spend a weekend in the machine shop.