New Student Housing Assignments
New students receive their housing assignments in July based on their submitted Housing Preferences form.
Fast facts
- Assignments are sent to the student's Cornell email address
- Every pair is reviewed by hand for the best compatibility based on the remaining unassigned student pool and the information provided in Housing Preferences forms
- Moving buildings later in the semester is a simple administrative process that the Res Life office can guide students through
Students may find that their assigned room, residence hall, or roommate do not completely match their preferences. Below are the most common reasons why this may occur.
Date of Preference Form
The majority of students submit their housing preferences forms by February. Students who waited longer will have fewer options still remaining. For example, students requesting mixed gender floors will be placed on mixed gender floors until all spaces are full. Further students will be placed on gendered floors with attempts made to match other preferences. Students may also request a specific building but the building is filled before they are placed.
Restrictive Preferences
Having many specific preferences means a smaller population of matching students to choose from. We try our best to match students with the highest amount of like preferences but sometimes the ideal roommate a student is looking for either does not exist or has already been paired with another person. Also, preferences may be for options that do not exist. An example would be requesting a specific themed living community and a specific building which does not have that themed community.
Limited Room Capacity
A projection of how many new students would apply and how many returning students would return is made in early spring. New students are placed in rooms that were then held from upperclassmen room selection. There is a lot of time for those projections to change by July. If more students return and more students apply than projected, fewer options exist for new students. This means buildings fill much faster than some people realize.
Mismatched Roommate Requests
Students may be surprised to not be assigned the specific roommate they requested on their Housing Preferences form. This is most likely because the other student did not mutually request them in their form. We require a mutual request to avoid a one-sided interest that might make students uncomfortable.
Late Preferences
Students who do not submit a Housing Preferences form by the end of June deadline risk having no preferences considered. In addition, students who make edits to their form or who communicate to the College additional preferences past the end of June deadline risk having rooming decisions already made which cannot be untangled from the large, complex task which is room placement.
Delayed Assignment
If a new student has not yet received their room assignment while others have, this may be because a suitable room matching their preferences is not available yet but there is a high likelihood it will be soon and thus a room assignment letter is forthcoming. Also, we may have trouble finding a good match for the student. A delay allows us to reevaluate the options after a week or two. In that time, more students may enroll or others may transfer providing additional options. We prefer to send only one assignment letter and only after a placement has been made instead of a series of letters with multiple changes. This is the reason for the delay when we anticipate this could happen.