{"id":61,"date":"2016-06-06T15:52:52","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T15:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/?p=61"},"modified":"2016-06-06T21:56:04","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T21:56:04","slug":"an-easy-improvement-to-the-mit-grad-housing-lotto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/life-at-mit\/an-easy-improvement-to-the-mit-grad-housing-lotto\/","title":{"rendered":"An easy improvement to the MIT grad housing lotto"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disclaimer: MIT grad programs can be very insular (perhaps this is true of graduate programs in general), which causes an echo chamber effect leading grad students to be more acutely aware of problems that affect them than problems that affect people in general. The problem I\u2019m discussing in this post is very much an MIT grad student \u201cfirst world problem,\u201d but even so, I\u2019d argue it\u2019s still worth trying to fix, and the following discussion might be applicable to other problems as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

MIT has an atypically large graduate housing program: about a third of grad students live in MIT dorms, and the proportion among first year grad students is much higher. I lived in the dorms my first two years at MIT, while I only stayed in the dorms at UC Berkeley (my alma mater) for one year. That I lived in graduate dorms longer than I lived in undergrad dorms might surprise some, but it\u2019s simply the result of how good of a deal the MIT grad dorms are. The dorms provide an extremely short commute, facilities personnel that are more responsive than any landlord I\u2019ve dealt with, faster internet than I\u2019ve had anywhere else, and you pay about market rate. Grad dorms are also set up more like apartments: your bathroom is only shared among a few people (not the entire hall) and you have a kitchen, so cooking for yourself is actually feasible. While all these features are quite nice, I feel the MIT graduate dorms have one major weak point: the lottery that is used to determine MIT grad housing assignments.<\/p>\n

The process of how grad housing is assigned is described here<\/a>, and while the process isn\u2019t 100% transparent, enough information is provided that it\u2019s possible to infer how the algorithm they use for room assignments works.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the experience from the perspective of the grad student looking for housing:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You rank all the dorms (and room types) that you\u2019d be willing to live in. You can also submit requested roommates along with your ranking. This ranking needs to be submitted by early May.<\/li>\n
  2. A few weeks later you receive at most one room assignment. If you receive a room assignment and don\u2019t take it, you pay a $250 penalty (not trivial on a grad student stipend). If you don\u2019t receive a room assignment, you can add yourself to the wait list (at which point your fate is truly up in the air).<\/li>\n
  3. If your requested roommates received the same room assignment that you did, you will (most likely) be assigned to the same room. If not, you are assigned random roommates.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    There are two reasons that this system is frustrating to me. A minor frustration is that the delay between steps 1 and 2 is unnecessarily long (in terms of how complex the assignment algorithm is, although admittedly the delay is likely from bureaucratic reasons). My bigger complaint is with how roommate assignments are handled. When you\u2019re looking for housing, one of the first (if not the first) things you determine is who you want to live with. If you have friends who you want to live with and try to live in the MIT dorms, you risk getting split up or having to pay a penalty, since you can\u2019t indicate to the housing assignment process that you only want to live in the dorms if it\u2019s with a specific roommate. This happened to me my second year at MIT: I got a room assignment while the friend I wanted to live with didn\u2019t, but I stuck with MIT to avoid the penalty. (That experience might be the reason I\u2019m writing this post, even though it happened years ago.)<\/p>\n

    The housing site implies that both of these issues are due to the \u201ccomplexity of the algorithm.\u201d They don\u2019t explicitly tell us how the algorithm works, but they do provide three points about what the algorithm prioritizes and how to maximize your chances of getting a room assignment:<\/p>\n