Today is the second night of the infamous and dreaded housing lottery. Those students who were smart enough to seek out Program Housing will circumvent the process. In years past, one lucky person and his/her group would win the right to first pick in the lottery by entering him/herself in a raffle; this year, however, the raffle was done away with. Regardless, winning the first pick awards the winner and his/her group the coveted opportunity to have the first choice from any housing unit on campus.

However, in ancient times (i.e. as late as spring 2010), winning the first pick in the housing lottery used to be less simple than choosing a silly raffle ticket out of a box. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), many students don’t know about the previous way one could win the first pick: a video competition. This year’s seniors are the last people to have experienced said competition.

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A while back, Wesleying—BlogDH’s incredibly snarky equivalent at Wesleyan—interviewed the  person with the worst number in the school’s GRS (the equivalent to our housing lottery). We loved what we read and thought the concept was brilliant, so we threw polite caution to the wind and reached out to the person with the worst number in our dreaded housing lottery, #791, for an interview. Unfortunately, she’s going abroad next semester, so she’s no longer in the lottery. We moved one sad number up the list and managed to snag an interview with the person with the next worst number: Neha Verma ’16. Her number? #790. Did your heart just sink? Because all of ours did. Luckily, Verma has a good attitude despite living every Brown student’s nightmare.

Where do you live at the moment?
West (Hotel) Andrews 305. I have a walk-in closet I have converted into a coffee shop and a window that looks out over the courtyard.

So, you got stuck with a shitty housing lottery number? When you inform your friends of your fate, they probably start using scary words like “Summer Assignment” and “Perkins.” Some people have even told you that they’re thinking of sharing a lounge with random people. While that’s all good and terrifying, we’re here to offer some more creative possibilities for housing accommodations next year if your worst case scenario ends up becoming your reality.

The microscopic gap between City Sports and Kinkos right off Thayer:

Hey, Providence fire department says it’s small, but we think it’s cozy! And you can’t beat the location – you’re basically on Thayer. Does Bajas accept FlexPoints?

Leung Family Gallery: The sub-free, quiet dorm option for summer assignment!

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For a long time, students have been wondering exactly what the dorm options will be for the 2013 housing lottery. On Wednesday, ResCouncil posted a list of all the changes. We’ve broken them down for you in an easy-to-digest map:

Note: Greek and program houses located in sophomore communities will still be open to juniors and seniors.

A year ago, the University announced a sweeping plan for renovating and reorganizing campus housing. We won’t recap the details of that, but there are some important differences between that plan and the new one: Perkins will be sophomore doubles, not junior/senior singles, and Slater and Hegeman will be for juniors and seniors, not sophomores. Read more here.

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Many former Keeney residents were shocked when they returned to campus to find that the building received a major facelift. But this summer’s changes hardly end there.

Today’s Herald featured a spread that breaks down all of this and next summer’s housing changes, which aim to create a more uniform progression of housing from freshman to senior year. Since we’ve already given you a photo tour of the new Keeney, we now bring you inside some of the other renovated dorms.

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The Housing Lottery is, well, a shitshow. We’ve got you covered with commentary and live updates on what’s going on in Sayles Hall, who’s taking your favorite room, and everything else in between.

Take a break from the stress of the housing lottery, and head over to Jo’s, which is hosting a Year of China special from 6 to 10 p.m. tonight. The special menu will include fried rice, egg rolls, dumplings, blossom salad and sesame noodles, according to culinary guru Aaron Fitzsenry.

Beyond food, the special will also feature “a Chinese gown fashion show, calligraphy and musical and dance performances,” according to the Dining Services website.

Time to take a break from that spicy with spicy kielbasa, and grab yourself some egg rolls.

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If you’re participating in the Housing Lottery (aka Shelter Games), you’ve got until Wednesday the 11th (numbers 1 through 460) or Tuesday the 17th (461 through 697) to map out your strategy. Which (at least for my freshman and sophomore groups of 11 and 8 people, respectively) meant contingency plans upon contingency plans upon contingency plans. Historically, it has proven a huge pain in the ass to navigate the huge amount of room info, past results, and other pertinent information from the Res Council website: there’s just so much.

Fortunately, some students created a tool to make the process at least 10,000 times easier (actual mathematical figure). Nathan Malkin ’13 and Sumner Warren ’13 have developed Cella over the past semester as a successor to their CS32 project Domus, a desktop app with similar functionality created with Miya Schneider ’13. This tool is incredibly versatile as well as informative. It uses a database of rooms and your preferences (only want to live on Main Campus? Want to live anywhere but Pembroke? Know what dorm you want to be in?) to provide you with tons of options for a group of a specified size, also taking into account your lottery number in comparison with past results in order to rank the probability of each room. It also provides links to floor plans and other info specific to each dorm (gender neutrality, apartment rate, etc.). If you want to play around with different breakdowns of a large group, create as many separate searches in separate tabs as you want. Check out their About page to see what else the tool can do, or better yet, go forth and experiment. The design is incredibly intuitive and easy to use.

May the odds be ever in your favor.