Posts Tagged ‘housing’
Shollenberger on renovations, student debt, and peer advisers
Last week, Spectator sat down with Dean of Student Affairs Kevin Shollenberger and Dean of Community Development and Multicultural Affairs Terry Martinez for an end-of-semester interview. Some highlights:
- In with the new: The lounge in Carman Hall will be renovated over the summer, following several rounds of student input on architectural plans. Additionally, construction is getting underway on the three 113th Street brownstones that are being converted to undergraduate housing, following student feedback on furniture and other finishes for the dorms.
- Helping hand: The Center for Student Advising has hired eight peer advisers—six from Columbia College and two from the School and Engineering and Applied Sciences, rather than four from each school as originally planned. The peer advisers are Jennifer Bai, CC ’13, Elias Boujaoude, CC ’13, Phillip Fletcher, CC ’13, Benjamin Frieling, SEAS ’14, Will Hughes, CC ’13, Steele Sternberg, CC ’13, Amanda Suarez, CC ’14, and Min Yeoh, SEAS ’13.
There’s always more housing news
Wondering what those new rooms in the 113th Street convent will look like? Curious about how Columbia’s administration works? Ben Gittelson reports from Columbia College Student Council’s penultimate meeting of the academic year:
- Assessing the advisers: A team of advisers from the Center for Student Advising presented the results of their two-and-a-half year review process. Check out the full story here.
- Valuable real estate: Dean of Community Development and Multicultural Affairs Terry Martinez presented the floor plans for the new brownstone housing on 113th Street. The brownstone will include a multipurpose room, a bike room, and a work room, among other common spaces. More »
Closing the housing market inefficiencies
For any intrepid comp-sci majors out there, I have an idea for the next Facebook.
Ok, maybe not Facebook, but a social marketplace for undergrad housing, which in the world of Columbia, is probably just as significant to all of us as a the thing called “life” that Facebook covers for the rest of the world.
Here’s my proposal: What if someone made a Craigslist/eBay-esque website that allowed people to buy, sell, or auction their lottery numbers? (Because who doesn’t want more complications in the housing process?!?)
But seriously, let’s say you’re a rising senior who’s just planning on snagging some Broadway singles with some friends. Easily attainable with even the worst 30-point lottery number. But what if you open up your housing portal and discover something like 30/43? Holy shit, that could get like, the underground laser tag arena in PrezBo’s house!!! (Or at least a Watt studio single!)
While that would certainly be nice, you aren’t necessarily dying for Watt, and you’d be more than happy with Broadway, so why not have the ability to trade your number to someone who’s prepared to sell one of their kidneys for their own kitchen and bathroom? More »
Housing: Recap of day five, preview of day six
Today was the penultimate day of Suite Selection and, we have to say, things were far less chaotic than they were last week. Outside of Claremont (which we’ll get to later), the juniors ensured that there would be no suites or even studio doubles left for the sophomores. That meant that today’s selection was all about doubles. Sophomores utilized Sophomore Pair-Up to grab chunks of the remaining buildings, with the vast majority choosing one of the Big Five: Broadway, McBain, Nussbaum, Schapiro, and Wien. The savvier sophomores also took their time to consider the oft-forgotten options of the sixth floor of EC and on the tenth floor of Furnald. Overall, the order of their choices was fairly haphazard since it’s tough to make a conclusive argument at this point that any type of double is better than any other–it’s all about personal preferences now. More »
Housing: recap of day 3, preview of day 4
On Day Three of Suite Selection, the impact of yesterday’s Senior Regroup became apparent. The mixed-point groups were left to pick through the carnage, as the two-point groups ate up the medium- and low-demand Woodbridge lines, the Symposium doubles, and the Watt one-bedroom apartments, all of which were gone by the day’s close.
After everyone’s lottery numbers were published, it seemed like Woodbridge could last deep into the 20-point round. However, the elimination of the UAH apartments combined with the insane popularity of Woodbridge during Regroup meant that its cutoff was pretty much in line with the cutoff from last year. More »
Housing: Recap of day two, preview of day three
Day Two of Suite Selection brought the second half of the 30-point round. The all-senior groups with lottery numbers worse than 1500 trickled in to John Jay lounge to either choose their rooms or see what was left on the Whiteboard and leave in disappointment.
The eight outstanding six-person townhouses were taken in the morning, getting cut off at 30/2279. This was a much tougher cutoff than last year, when six-person townhouses were available up until the very last group to pick before Regroup.
Conversely, the EC two-person flats had a cutoff of 30/1726, a much later cutoff than last year’s. It just goes to show how the cutoff history isn’t everything. More »
A look inside: photo tours of Columbia dorms
If you’re still trying to figure out where to live, this one’s for you. We present an interactive feature with photo tours of each dorm after the jump.
Just one photo from the collection:
Watt / Courtesy of Jasper Clyatt
Love letter to a small, no, fun-sized single
It’s housing time.
The glorious weather is rent with shouts of glee from those guaranteed a 900 sq. foot room, to wails of pain from those guaranteed to be shafted. Tempers run high and morale dips low.
But you, my beloved 90 sq. foot shipping container with a window, you shelter me from the cares of the outside world. Here are a few things that I’m going to be reminiscing nostalgically about next semester:
1. Being able to look out the window towards Low Steps and gauge whether I should bring an umbrella to class that day by how many small children are running around. (Veritable daycare’s worth = fantastic weather all day, 0-5 accompanied by adults checking their watches = chance of rain.)
2. Resting my elbows on the windowsill, inhaling the crisp morning air while enjoying the view of the Jersey shore, and then exhaling in relief that a vast landscape of rooftops and a river separate me from all the bumpits and spray tan canisters. More »
Writing up the RAs
And welcome back to another edition of, “Is it really worth $220,000?” This week, I wanted to look at another offender: resident advisors.
Follow with me while I do some FroSci back of the envelope calculations.
There are 5776 students in SEAS and CC, and if we assume 99% of them live on campus, that makes 5718.24 residents (we can count NFL offensive line prospect Jeff Adams as the extra quarter of a person.)
Divide that by the 119 RAs that WikiCU lists as being staffed, and you get a ratio of one RA to every 48 residents.
Let’s assume the average room and board to be $7,750 a year. Knowing that RAs get free housing, that comes out to a cost of $161 per student for each RA. Throw in the free dining meals that freshmen and LLC RAs get, the small payment they receive, and the funding it takes for Student Affairs to train them, and the cost easily exceeds $200 a pop. More »
Small problems, big implications
For a second-semester senior like me, déjà vu is not so much a momentary occurrence as it is a state of mind. Stress about housing, dissatisfaction with CCE in the face of internship and job pressures, the arbitrariness of academic deadlines: all of these important issues have plagued Columbia and Barnard students for years. New scandals pop up from time to time, but they tend to fall back on tired tropes (if you don’t know what I’m talking about here, you might be living under a rock, or perhaps Harmony.)
The duration and persistence of a problem, of course, is not a reason to ignore it, especially if it continues to shape our experiences as students. We should push our administration to reform the aspects of our school that fail to live up to our expectations. We should criticize the parts of our education that we find marginalizing or meaningless. But to move beyond criticism alone, we need to change our approach. More »