Brace yourselves, it is that time of the year again. Freshmen actively looking for upperclassmen friends. The breaking of friendships over rooming situations and extensive debates about which floor all your friends should live on. But most importantly, yet another Res Ed mishap.

Last week, April 2 to 4, were the allocated dates for NYU Abu Dhabi’s fall 2018 room selection process. After much criticism from upperclassmen last year, the Office of Residential Education did not continue their raffle for priority housing this year. To make the room selection process as fair as possible this year, Res Ed tried a different system: a room selection application piloted by NYU New York.

However, on the first day of room selection, upperclassmen with relatively early time slots were met with a very small number of single rooms to choose from. Surprised and enraged by the lack of available singles, students wondered what had gone wrong yet again. On April 3, Res Ed posted an announcement on the NYUAD Student Portal apologizing for having to postpone the room selection process due to unforeseen issues.

According to Res Ed, some students found loopholes in the new software which allowed students to hold rooms even before their allotted time slots. This glitch in the new system led Res Ed to revert back to the old software system while preserving the old applications, roommate groups and selection order.

This year’s Res Ed controversy does not come as a surprise to NYUAD students who have faced similar, if not worse, issues every year with the housing application. Being treated as NYU’s guinea pigs is not an alien feeling for NYUAD students, but this new housing application software not only presents an obstacle that delays the room selection process but also intensifies the skepticism towards the Office of Residential Education, despite their constant efforts to improve the housing process.

Additionally, finding and selecting the perfect room is not the only problem. Choosing the right roommate can either make or break the experience of your entire year, and last year, Res Ed added yet another complication to the mix. Since the NYUAD campus got more room change requests than the NYUNY campus, Res Ed decided to stop freshmen from picking their roommates and made the room change process almost impossible.

During the housing registration process last year, students were asked to fill out a lifestyle survey that supposedly matched people together through a computer based algorithm instead of self-selection.

The survey questions ask students to rate themselves between five different positions on a set of several lifestyle questions. The questionnaire included questions like, “What do you consider yourself as?” with a scale of ranging from liberal to conservative, and, “How do you like to sleep?” with options ranging from having the lights on to complete darkness. These questions were somewhat indicative of lifestyle habits; however, answering them was not as simple as it seemed.

Unfortunately, the algorithms did not work most of the time and students’ hopes and dreams of finding their new best friend as a roommate went down the drain. My roommate and I sat together at the beginning of the semester and retook the survey. For two freshmen, finding out that they were the complete opposites of each other was not the smoothest way to start the year. Time did not heal the lifestyle discrepancies, and the only thing that matched and kept us going was who we were as people and how much we were willing to sacrifice and give up. As if the previous form was not superficial enough, Res Ed is making it even worse by cutting down on the comprehensiveness of the form and limiting the survey to only four very general questions. Not to say that they will not be disregarded anyways, but cutting down the questions is in no way going to develop the roommate selection process. The most important lifestyle details like room temperature, lighting, study time and personality traits were completely omitted.

These changes do not affect upperclassmen because they will continue to have the option of choosing their roommates. Instead, it is the incoming freshmen who will have to deal with this unpleasant situation.

Freshman year is already an extremely difficult shift and the last thing you want is to have a roommate with an entirely different lifestyle.

In the midst of fighting over the lights and whose turn it is to clean the bathroom, we, as roommates, eventually learned to match on the scale of how late we can stay awake gossiping and how many Hot Cheetos we can eat in one sitting.

Despite all of the initial conflicts, we have to thank Res Ed for allowing us to conceive our friendship; but, how long can Res Ed continue forcing freshmen to bond while depending completely on luck and a superficial set of questionnaires?