1 Introduction

Rooming lotteries are a mechanism to switch rooms within Ashdown House if you are already a resident.

At Ashdown House, we have rooming lotteries approximately monthly, as vacancies become available, and are run by the AHEC Operations Officer. Higher preference is given to those with more seniority in the building, determined by the number of terms of residence plus any additional points earned for officer service to the House. If you want to change rooms or room types, simply watch your e-mail for lottery announcements and enter the rooming lottery when one opens. Just remember that if you do enter a lottery and win a new assignment, you must move. If you enter and do not win a new assignment, or do not enter, you simply stay in your current room.

2 Entering the lottery

There are two ways to enter the lottery: individual and stapled. You may enter one or both ways. In an individual entry, you preference individual rooms in Ashdown, whether they are bedrooms in a suite or efficiency apartments. In a stapled entry, you specify 1 or 2 other residents and enter together, specifying entire suites (not rooms). Stapled entries help you preference who you want to live and move with. Stapling is also useful if you have a vacancy in your suite and want to preference a particular person to move in (by entering only your own suite together with them in a staple group).

All you need to do is preference rooms (suites, in the stapled case) in order of most preferred to least preferred, one per line. Do NOT list rooms that you would not value over your current room.

If you're ready and a lottery is open, you can enter an individual form or enter a stapled form or both. If you submit both, stapling forms are considered with higher priority and individual forms will be looked at only if your staple request is unsuccessful.

Please note that if you enter the lottery and get moved, you MUST move. Also please note that Ashdown's suites are all co-ed except for very small number of single-gender suites, and people of any gender may be placed in any vacancy, unless a special request has been granted to you. (When we say co-ed, we mean the suites. No bedrooms are shared in Ashdown; every bedroom has only 1 bed, and every bedroom has its own separate lock and key.)

3 Seniority-based system

Our lottery gives priority to people with a higher number of seniority points. Seniority points are earned for each term of residence at Ashdown, with additional points earned for officer service to the house. Staple groups are considered to have a seniority equal to the sum of their members. You can check your residency seniority points here (though we are not yet showing officer-earned points yet online, we are keeping track of them internally).

If you're interested in the exact details, you can read about exactly what our lottery algorithm is, or you can simply construct a list of rooms you'd like to move to, most desired first, and watch your e-mail for the next lottery.

If you have any questions, please see the FAQ first, and if your question is not answered, please contact the AHEC Operations Officer at ahec-ops (at) mit.edu.