Anna Gorman, Campus Carrier news editor

The room selection process for the 2025-2026 school year is currently underway, with the application and prepayment due Saturday. The process will span over three days, from March 17 to March 19, according to an email sent from the Office of Residence Life. A student’s number of credit hours will determine which day they will select their room.

The room selection process can be a stressor for many students, especially for those wanting popular dorms such as single rooms or rooms in Centennial and the townhouses. This proves to be a challenge for the Office of Residence Life, according to Director of Residence Life Stephen Swieton.

“There’s no way for everybody to be happy,” Swieton said. “Every year we hear [the] perception that everyone lives in Centennial as a senior. Well, 125 people live in Centennial, so not everyone’s gonna live there. So, when people don’t get Centennial, then people are upset. It’s the reality that we have the buildings we have and can’t necessarily meet what everybody is hoping for.”

To ensure fairness in the process, room selection is based off of completed credit hours. Swieton said this system makes the process fair for all years, compared to other systems that base it on when a student fulfills their pre-housing deposit.

“A lot of big schools do it based off of when you complete your housing application and make your deposit,” Swieton said. “That gives the advantage to students who have the prepayment money just sitting around compared to other students [who] have to work to get that money. That system is very common in schools that only require you to live on campus for like two years, where their spaces are similar, but otherwise you would have freshmen who get [their application] in on that very first day and end up in Centennial. That wouldn’t be fair.”

To Swieton, basing the system off of completed credit hours allows the office to be consistent with their goal of opening more housing options up to students as they gather more credits.

The residence life office often hears complaints of the system not working, due to students not getting the dorm they preferred.

“The process, as it stands right now, has worked exactly the way it’s supposed to for quite a a while,” Swieton said. “What many people perceive as it not working is not everybody gets the room [they want]. And whenever that happens, the answer is that the system didn’t work, but it did work exactly the way it’s designed to work.”

Because of this, there are currently no plans to majorly revamp the room selection system, though small changes have been made recently. For example, the room selection process went from spanning four nights last year to three this year, due to the small amount of people still needing a room closer to the last couple of nights, particularly during mixed group time slots. 

“You might have 30 people when we assign time slots who are in a group, and by the time you get to that group, there’s two people left because [the others] were picked earlier by people with more credits,” Swieton said. “So, that we have consolidated down to one night.”

The room selection process will span three nights instead of four until further notice.

The Office of Residence Life continues to encourage students to reach out if they have questions about how the room selection process works.

“I think we’re pretty open about how it works, and I think we go to pretty good extent to get that information out through the emails, the FAQs, the videos, the info session [which was hosted on February 20],” Swieton said. “We have people who are available to assist in person in Krannert, on the phone or by Zoom here during room selection.”

During the week of room selection, the Office of Residence Life will send out an email every morning detailing which dorms are full and which ones are still available.

“We do that because we want them to be able to navigate it,” Swieton said. “We want them to be able to pick spaces where they can be happy and successful. We just don’t have suites for everybody, and we don’t have singles for everybody, and that’s part and parcel of what it means to live in a community with shared spaces.”

However, the introduction of Morgan-Bailey, the new health sciences building behind the Cage and Moon, will affect room selection trends. Morgan-Bailey will be the nursing program’s new home, and its third floor will act as a dorm hall open for all returning students. It is scheduled to be finished this summer.

 “I have a good sense of how quickly Centennial [and] the Townhouses will fill up and all that,” Swieton said. “[Morgan-Bailey] is totally new for us, and I have no idea how quickly it will go. I don’t know if it’s going to be super popular because it’s new, or less popular because people just aren’t thinking about it. I know that there’s a rumor out there that it’s only for nursing students, and that’s not true, so there may be people who aren’t thinking about it or looking at it because of that rumor.”

Aside from the introduction of Morgan-Bailey, the Office of Residence Life does not have any plans to build other dorms or expand housing, partly to maintain the current housing capacity and partly to keep the appeal of the “small school” Berry has built for itself.

“There’s a number that we want to be at, and that’s where we’re at now,” Swieton said. “The only reason to build more and expand our housing would because you’re getting rid of older buildings. But our older buildings are historic. Like, the Ford Complex isn’t going anywhere. How many college students get to say they lived in a castle?”

Swieton said the only reason for Berry to add more housing options would be to increase overall enrollment, and that is something Berry is not interested in changing.

“If you intended to increase your overall enrollment, you don’t just have to build more residence halls, you also have to build more classrooms, you have to expand everything,” Swieton said. “And Berry’s not trying to become a large school. We want to be this sweet spot of where we’re at because it builds the community that we want to build. There is just something about the Berry community that it matters that you can’t walk around and not see people you know. You’re not a number here. Even being able to schedule time to come in and meet [with faculty and staff], that doesn’t happen as easily elsewhere. I think we’re at the right size.”

Though the Office of Residence Life isn’t sure how popular Morgan-Bailey will be, any time something happens that makes a building special changes trends seen with room selection.

“Last year, we redid [Thomas Berry] over the summer, so people knew it was going to be brand new this year, and that impacted how people selected dorms,” Swieton said. “The year ‘Stranger Things’ was filmed here, we saw that impact how people selected spaces. People thought that was really cool, and we definitely saw that with first-year students. That year, Ford was the most popular place for incoming students to want to go.”

Given how new Morgan-Bailey is, and its location, Swieton said he wouldn’t be surprised if it filled up early during room selection week.

“It’s right by the Cage, it’s over by the football field, it’s right by the big Cage lot, you’re pretty close to Krannert and it’s going to keep you really close to Moon and Laughlin,” Swieton said. “And of course, if you’re a nursing student, you’re home, right? I think a lot of people do pick based on location, and we hear that a lot of students want to be in Morgan-Deerfield because it’s the closest building to Animal Science and McAllister. That’ll make it popular, too.”

Morgan-Bailey’s construction has been mostly met with excitement, particularly from nursing majors, according to Swieton, though there hasn’t been much feedback from students about the building in general.

For more information regarding Morgan-Bailey and the room selection process, students are encouraged to reach out to Swieton or anyone in the Office of Residence Life.