On Monday, April 8, Swarthmore opened pre-selection housing applications for students with accommodations, followed by the general selection process for rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
This year’s room selection was marked by the addition — and return — of several important policies, such as blocking and the housing waitlist. The Phoenix spoke with students and the administration to hear their reflections on the process and changes.
Darby Creegan ’26, a member of the new Housing Advisory Council who wrote a report on housing for the Student Government Organization (SGO), shared that some rising seniors eligible for housing accommodations have been dissatisfied with this year’s housing selection process.
“Some people didn’t receive accommodation for a single despite having one in previous years because they were told that [as rising seniors] they would be able to get a single anyway,” Creegan said. “Even though that may be true, as there are enough singles on campus for every rising senior, I’m unsure why people’s accommodations would have been removed and why they weren’t allowed to select during the pre-selection process, as I feel like that would ease people’s stress.”
Catherine Sostowski Herbes ’27, co-president of the Swarthmore Disability Association (SDA), explained that, during pre-selection, students are categorized into three groups based on their accommodation needs. Some rising seniors require fewer accommodations, leading Housing to assume that there are sufficient single rooms for all rising seniors — and they can instead prioritize an overflow of rising juniors requesting accommodations.
“I know rising seniors with many approved accommodations, or with more specific and less common accommodation requests, get to keep [their accommodations]. But there were a lot of rising seniors approved for a single accommodation, and they got waivers this year,” Herbes said.
Director of Residential Communities Amanda Atkinson promised that Housing will assist students with newly approved accommodations over the summer to ensure they get rooms that meet their needs.
“All students who had approved accommodations by the deadlines [Student Disability Services] sent out in late February were able to select spaces that met their needs,” Atkinson said. “Any students that got newly approved accommodations after that deadline that were not met in the general selection are on a waiting list for accommodations housing.”
When asked about the most common challenges students with accommodations faced, Herbes pointed out a highly restricted range of room options during the pre-selection process, which “pits them against each other and forces them to compete for the same rooms.” Additionally, she highlighted that students face delays in getting their accommodation requests approved, forcing them to participate in the general selection process.
“There were some students who were forced to pick in the general selection, and they did not have a good time slot. So, they are forced to select a room in a building that does not support their accommodations — for example, they needed AC, and yet they were placed into Wharton [Hall], which does not have air conditioning,” Herbes said.
Creegan noted that the class of 2026 appeared to be “fairly satisfied with the selection process,” highlighting that students have seen an increase in the availability of single rooms compared to previous years. According to the newsletter distributed by SGO and Housing on April 8, last year, rising juniors could only select singles until around 6:30 p.m. But this year, to Creegan’s knowledge, rising juniors could secure single rooms until almost 8 p.m.
When asked about blocking — where students opt to reside next to six other students, sometimes in suite-style accommodations or interconnected living spaces — Creegan pointed out that it is “a very historic option for housing that Swarthmore has always offered” and that certain dormitory buildings are practically designed to facilitate it.
“Worth Hall has a very weird structure. Its six towers are arranged vertically, and you can’t necessarily go through [one tower] to the other towers on each floor — it’s set up really well for blocking,” she said.
Creegan further noted that blocking is valuable in fostering a sense of community among students, borrowing from her experience living close to her friends.
“I lived in a Wharton Hall quad as a freshman and in a Mary Lyon Hall double as a sophomore, and I’ve been very fortunate to be down the hall from my very good friends each of those years,” she said. “Everyone is so busy here, and if you get to live with your friends, being able to slide in some extra time to connect and hang out is really important.”
Yifan Huang ’25 agreed that living with friends from different class years was a big reason to block in Worth Hall.
“Last year, the only blocks were offered in the NPPR Apartments, but those are [exclusively reserved] for seniors — and I have friends from different class years and wanted to stay with them,” he said.
Although Huang and his friends found getting a block easier than expected, they were initially worried that there might not be any blocks left when Huang’s turn came. To address these concerns, Creegan suggests making more rooms in Worth Hall available for blocking, noting that it has an “oversized benefit” for the student body even when considering the most vigorous rebuttals.
“The best rebuttal that I’ve heard from Amanda [Atkinson] is that students who don’t have people with whom they can block won’t be able to have singles if all of them are reserved for blocking,” Creegan said. “To which I say, even blocking all of Worth Hall isn’t blocking that many singles on campus. Many residence halls work really well for people who just want to live in a single, such as Wharton Hall or Parrish Hall, and there’s no reason for them to be blocked. Let’s block the halls that are already forming small communities and just let them be small communities.”
When asked about the housing waitlist policy, Creegan mentioned that specific provisions are intentionally included to discourage students from joining it — such as not knowing when they will get housing and giving up the option to choose their selected roommates.
“Last year, I had a bad selection time, and so did my roommate. We chose to live in ML as a guarantee of where our room would be and who we would live with, so we didn’t want to go on the waitlist,” Creegan said. “And people who did go on the waitlist last year, retroactively hearing that they could have been separated from their roommate, have said that they wouldn’t have gone on the waitlist.”
According to Atkinson, only 72 students have chosen to be placed on the housing waitlist this year, compared to 161 students last year. This notable drop might be connected to the introduction of the new Final Selection policy.
“All students who had been part of a class year selection round but did not select a room were put into Final Selection on Friday. This gave folks who might not have been able to fill a room to capacity the chance to get a spot. Hard to believe that one last NPPR single was available and snatched up in that selection round,” she said. “After that round, we have 72 students on the Housing Waiting List who will be randomly placed later in the summer, likely late July.”
Creegan said she strongly dislikes the rule that splits up roommates on the waiting list and is actively working to bring it to the administration’s attention.
“I’ve had a lot of conversations with Amanda Atkinson about that, in which I’ve expressed my opinion that rising sophomores have pretty little choice in the housing process; the one thing you can guarantee is that you will be with the person you get to choose to live with — and when you go on the waitlist, you’re choosing to give that up,” Creegan said.
Herbes also advised against joining the waiting list.
“I don’t think the waitlist is helping anything. I think it’s making it worse, adding to the anxiety of not being certain about your rooming situation,” Herbes said. “I also think the options you can assume for the waitlist are going to be highly unfavorable, at least for upperclass students. The highly desirable dorms are filled the fastest, and there is no expectation that someone will be kicked out of their dorm after they select it; that’s not happening and shouldn’t happen.”
Despite being aware of those factors, Julia Powell ’27 and her roommate still chose to join a waiting list instead of settling for Mary Lyon Hall (ML) due to their demanding schedules as student-athletes.
“We have 6 a.m. practices, many times 6 a.m. lifts, and practices that go until 10:30 p.m., so sometimes we’re not getting out until really late — and we don’t want to make that walk all the way to ML,” Powell said. “We understood the risks of going on the waitlist, but we thought that, in the end, that was the best bet to have a better living situation that’s not ML.”
This year, the Housing Advisory Council introduced blocking to make Mary Lyon Hall “more desirable” to students, and Atkinson shared with The Phoenix that rising sophomores selected one block in the building.
“Once I saw that there were no matched roommate groups that were big enough to fill Mary Lyon blocks, I switched the setting so the block did not need to be filled to select it. That was about mid-way through the rising sophomore selection. Students still had to fill the room to select it, but not the block of rooms,” she said.
Powell also expressed concerns about no-show shuttles to Mary Lyon, noting that she wants to arrive on time for classes or field hockey practices and avoid having to explain herself to professors and her coach.
“As much as I’m appreciative of the buses, they can be very unreliable at times, and I don’t want to be late to a class or practice because I was waiting for the bus and it didn’t show up,” Powell said.
Even though Mary Lyon Hall is not usually a top choice for Swarthmore students, Panhavoan Reth ’25 lived there in his sophomore and junior years and chose to stay there for his senior year, highlighting that he grew to like the building over the two years he spent there. Reth mentioned that living in Mary Lyon Hall helps him “escape the Swarthmore bubble” and that the building’s quiet atmosphere makes it a great choice for more introverted students.
“I was placed in ML for the first time during my sophomore year when we still had to rank dorms. I put an all-women’s dorm for my 10th ranking — that was how much I didn’t want to live in ML,” Reth said. “When results came out and I learned I was put in ML, I thought it was the end of the world. But, once you get past the distance [between the building and campus], ML isn’t all that bad. I think there’s even a saying that if it were on campus, it would be the best dorm — so, give ML its chance.”
Associate Dean of Students and Director of Student Engagement Rachel Head shared that the housing selection process was different before the COVID-19 outbreak. Until 2009, Swarthmore divided each class into three tiers for selection, and students were randomly placed within these groups over their class years. This often meant that some students consistently got better housing options by luck, while others ended up with fewer choices due to their random ranking within their cohort. To address this, students proposed the “lottery average model,” which aimed to reduce randomness within cohorts and ensure a fairer distribution of housing options. Under this system, sophomores were given a random number to choose their housing for the next year, and that number served as a calibration point for their housing selection in the subsequent two years. The model — known as a weighted lottery — ran until 2019, when the institution had to adjust its housing selection process due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the SGO and Housing newsletter, “Under the current system, each student receives an independent lottery time each year, meaning that if you had a late lottery time as a rising sophomore, it will not give you a better chance of having an early lottery time as a rising junior.”
Powell expressed her support for the historic, weighted housing lottery system, noting that she finds it beneficial as someone who might have to reside in an “undesirable” building for a second consecutive year.
“From a very biased perspective, I support [the policy] because I live in Willets [Hall], and then my roommate and I might have to live in ML,” Powell said. “But I also could hear the argument that it would be fair if housing was completely randomized for everyone and your bad luck was just bad luck.”
Among other challenges faced during the housing selection process, Nayra Humala ’26 pointed out that the Swarthmore website does not have enough dorm pictures. In addition, floor plans are unavailable before the preview process, making it difficult for students to make informed decisions.
“I understand that Housing can’t post pictures of everything because there’s so much, but on the webpage, you really only get [to see] two pictures of each dorm,” Humala said. “It was also stressful not to have [the access] to the floor plans until the preview process had started, which is relatively short. I would have wanted to have them [the floor plans] earlier so I could start making a thorough decision on what dorms have a better layout and better meet my needs.”
Humala also suggested that the Office of Student Engagement (OSE) should feature more dorms on its Instagram, partner with students to display real dorm setups, and host events for students to learn about residence halls firsthand.
“There is only so much you can get from the floor plan or pictures, so I was reaching out to different students to ask them about their housing experiences,” she said. “Having a place where you can talk to residents from each hall would be useful, as there are things such as showers and air conditioning that, at the end of the day, just do matter.”
Headline: Home Away From Home: Post-Housing Selection Reflections
Writers: Yana Sharifullina
On Monday, April 8, Swarthmore opened pre-selection housing applications for students with accommodations, followed by the general selection process for rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
This year’s room selection was marked by the addition — and return — of several important policies, such as blocking and the housing waitlist. The Phoenix spoke with students and the administration to hear their reflections on the process and changes.
Darby Creegan ’26, a member of the new Housing Advisory Council who wrote a report on housing for the Student Government Organization (SGO), shared that some rising seniors eligible for housing accommodations have been dissatisfied with this year’s housing selection process.
“Some people didn’t receive accommodation for a single despite having one in previous years because they were told that [as rising seniors] they would be able to get a single anyway,” Creegan said. “Even though that may be true, as there are enough singles on campus for every rising senior, I’m unsure why people’s accommodations would have been removed and why they weren’t allowed to select during the pre-selection process, as I feel like that would ease people’s stress.”
Catherine Sostowski Herbes ’27, co-president of the Swarthmore Disability Association (SDA), explained that, during pre-selection, students are categorized into three groups based on their accommodation needs. Some rising seniors require fewer accommodations, leading Housing to assume that there are sufficient single rooms for all rising seniors — and they can instead prioritize an overflow of rising juniors requesting accommodations.
“I know rising seniors with many approved accommodations, or with more specific and less common accommodation requests, get to keep [their accommodations]. But there were a lot of rising seniors approved for a single accommodation, and they got waivers this year,” Herbes said.
Director of Residential Communities Amanda Atkinson promised that Housing will assist students with newly approved accommodations over the summer to ensure they get rooms that meet their needs.
“All students who had approved accommodations by the deadlines [Student Disability Services] sent out in late February were able to select spaces that met their needs,” Atkinson said. “Any students that got newly approved accommodations after that deadline that were not met in the general selection are on a waiting list for accommodations housing.”
When asked about the most common challenges students with accommodations faced, Herbes pointed out a highly restricted range of room options during the pre-selection process, which “pits them against each other and forces them to compete for the same rooms.” Additionally, she highlighted that students face delays in getting their accommodation requests approved, forcing them to participate in the general selection process.
“There were some students who were forced to pick in the general selection, and they did not have a good time slot. So, they are forced to select a room in a building that does not support their accommodations — for example, they needed AC, and yet they were placed into Wharton [Hall], which does not have air conditioning,” Herbes said.
Creegan noted that the class of 2026 appeared to be “fairly satisfied with the selection process,” highlighting that students have seen an increase in the availability of single rooms compared to previous years. According to the newsletter distributed by SGO and Housing on April 8, last year, rising juniors could only select singles until around 6:30 p.m. But this year, to Creegan’s knowledge, rising juniors could secure single rooms until almost 8 p.m.
When asked about blocking — where students opt to reside next to six other students, sometimes in suite-style accommodations or interconnected living spaces — Creegan pointed out that it is “a very historic option for housing that Swarthmore has always offered” and that certain dormitory buildings are practically designed to facilitate it.
“Worth Hall has a very weird structure. Its six towers are arranged vertically, and you can’t necessarily go through [one tower] to the other towers on each floor — it’s set up really well for blocking,” she said.
Creegan further noted that blocking is valuable in fostering a sense of community among students, borrowing from her experience living close to her friends.
“I lived in a Wharton Hall quad as a freshman and in a Mary Lyon Hall double as a sophomore, and I’ve been very fortunate to be down the hall from my very good friends each of those years,” she said. “Everyone is so busy here, and if you get to live with your friends, being able to slide in some extra time to connect and hang out is really important.”
Yifan Huang ’25 agreed that living with friends from different class years was a big reason to block in Worth Hall.
“Last year, the only blocks were offered in the NPPR Apartments, but those are [exclusively reserved] for seniors — and I have friends from different class years and wanted to stay with them,” he said.
Although Huang and his friends found getting a block easier than expected, they were initially worried that there might not be any blocks left when Huang’s turn came. To address these concerns, Creegan suggests making more rooms in Worth Hall available for blocking, noting that it has an “oversized benefit” for the student body even when considering the most vigorous rebuttals.
“The best rebuttal that I’ve heard from Amanda [Atkinson] is that students who don’t have people with whom they can block won’t be able to have singles if all of them are reserved for blocking,” Creegan said. “To which I say, even blocking all of Worth Hall isn’t blocking that many singles on campus. Many residence halls work really well for people who just want to live in a single, such as Wharton Hall or Parrish Hall, and there’s no reason for them to be blocked. Let’s block the halls that are already forming small communities and just let them be small communities.”
When asked about the housing waitlist policy, Creegan mentioned that specific provisions are intentionally included to discourage students from joining it — such as not knowing when they will get housing and giving up the option to choose their selected roommates.
“Last year, I had a bad selection time, and so did my roommate. We chose to live in ML as a guarantee of where our room would be and who we would live with, so we didn’t want to go on the waitlist,” Creegan said. “And people who did go on the waitlist last year, retroactively hearing that they could have been separated from their roommate, have said that they wouldn’t have gone on the waitlist.”
According to Atkinson, only 72 students have chosen to be placed on the housing waitlist this year, compared to 161 students last year. This notable drop might be connected to the introduction of the new Final Selection policy.
“All students who had been part of a class year selection round but did not select a room were put into Final Selection on Friday. This gave folks who might not have been able to fill a room to capacity the chance to get a spot. Hard to believe that one last NPPR single was available and snatched up in that selection round,” she said. “After that round, we have 72 students on the Housing Waiting List who will be randomly placed later in the summer, likely late July.”
Creegan said she strongly dislikes the rule that splits up roommates on the waiting list and is actively working to bring it to the administration’s attention.
“I’ve had a lot of conversations with Amanda Atkinson about that, in which I’ve expressed my opinion that rising sophomores have pretty little choice in the housing process; the one thing you can guarantee is that you will be with the person you get to choose to live with — and when you go on the waitlist, you’re choosing to give that up,” Creegan said.
Herbes also advised against joining the waiting list.
“I don’t think the waitlist is helping anything. I think it’s making it worse, adding to the anxiety of not being certain about your rooming situation,” Herbes said. “I also think the options you can assume for the waitlist are going to be highly unfavorable, at least for upperclass students. The highly desirable dorms are filled the fastest, and there is no expectation that someone will be kicked out of their dorm after they select it; that’s not happening and shouldn’t happen.”
Despite being aware of those factors, Julia Powell ’27 and her roommate still chose to join a waiting list instead of settling for Mary Lyon Hall (ML) due to their demanding schedules as student-athletes.
“We have 6 a.m. practices, many times 6 a.m. lifts, and practices that go until 10:30 p.m., so sometimes we’re not getting out until really late — and we don’t want to make that walk all the way to ML,” Powell said. “We understood the risks of going on the waitlist, but we thought that, in the end, that was the best bet to have a better living situation that’s not ML.”
This year, the Housing Advisory Council introduced blocking to make Mary Lyon Hall “more desirable” to students, and Atkinson shared with The Phoenix that rising sophomores selected one block in the building.
“Once I saw that there were no matched roommate groups that were big enough to fill Mary Lyon blocks, I switched the setting so the block did not need to be filled to select it. That was about mid-way through the rising sophomore selection. Students still had to fill the room to select it, but not the block of rooms,” she said.
Powell also expressed concerns about no-show shuttles to Mary Lyon, noting that she wants to arrive on time for classes or field hockey practices and avoid having to explain herself to professors and her coach.
“As much as I’m appreciative of the buses, they can be very unreliable at times, and I don’t want to be late to a class or practice because I was waiting for the bus and it didn’t show up,” Powell said.
Even though Mary Lyon Hall is not usually a top choice for Swarthmore students, Panhavoan Reth ’25 lived there in his sophomore and junior years and chose to stay there for his senior year, highlighting that he grew to like the building over the two years he spent there. Reth mentioned that living in Mary Lyon Hall helps him “escape the Swarthmore bubble” and that the building’s quiet atmosphere makes it a great choice for more introverted students.
“I was placed in ML for the first time during my sophomore year when we still had to rank dorms. I put an all-women’s dorm for my 10th ranking — that was how much I didn’t want to live in ML,” Reth said. “When results came out and I learned I was put in ML, I thought it was the end of the world. But, once you get past the distance [between the building and campus], ML isn’t all that bad. I think there’s even a saying that if it were on campus, it would be the best dorm — so, give ML its chance.”
Associate Dean of Students and Director of Student Engagement Rachel Head shared that the housing selection process was different before the COVID-19 outbreak. Until 2009, Swarthmore divided each class into three tiers for selection, and students were randomly placed within these groups over their class years. This often meant that some students consistently got better housing options by luck, while others ended up with fewer choices due to their random ranking within their cohort. To address this, students proposed the “lottery average model,” which aimed to reduce randomness within cohorts and ensure a fairer distribution of housing options. Under this system, sophomores were given a random number to choose their housing for the next year, and that number served as a calibration point for their housing selection in the subsequent two years. The model — known as a weighted lottery — ran until 2019, when the institution had to adjust its housing selection process due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the SGO and Housing newsletter, “Under the current system, each student receives an independent lottery time each year, meaning that if you had a late lottery time as a rising sophomore, it will not give you a better chance of having an early lottery time as a rising junior.”
Powell expressed her support for the historic, weighted housing lottery system, noting that she finds it beneficial as someone who might have to reside in an “undesirable” building for a second consecutive year.
“From a very biased perspective, I support [the policy] because I live in Willets [Hall], and then my roommate and I might have to live in ML,” Powell said. “But I also could hear the argument that it would be fair if housing was completely randomized for everyone and your bad luck was just bad luck.”
Among other challenges faced during the housing selection process, Nayra Humala ’26 pointed out that the Swarthmore website does not have enough dorm pictures. In addition, floor plans are unavailable before the preview process, making it difficult for students to make informed decisions.
“I understand that Housing can’t post pictures of everything because there’s so much, but on the webpage, you really only get [to see] two pictures of each dorm,” Humala said. “It was also stressful not to have [the access] to the floor plans until the preview process had started, which is relatively short. I would have wanted to have them [the floor plans] earlier so I could start making a thorough decision on what dorms have a better layout and better meet my needs.”
Humala also suggested that the Office of Student Engagement (OSE) should feature more dorms on its Instagram, partner with students to display real dorm setups, and host events for students to learn about residence halls firsthand.
“There is only so much you can get from the floor plan or pictures, so I was reaching out to different students to ask them about their housing experiences,” she said. “Having a place where you can talk to residents from each hall would be useful, as there are things such as showers and air conditioning that, at the end of the day, just do matter.”
