mcdonaldge@lopers.unk.edu
The fall 2021 housing application remains the same in allowing students to request roommates and residence halls, with one exception. Students cannot request a specific room on the application.
UNK Housing and Residence Life removed the option to avoid complications.
“In this system, you can either do one or the other but when you try to do both selecting roommates and selecting rooms, and then only one person can do that and not the other person — it gets pretty complicated,” said LeAnn Jochum, the associate director of operations for Residence Life. “And we’ve also found that a lot of students don’t necessarily care exactly the room that they live in. Of course they care about the building.”
Instead, rooms will be assigned to students based on the three building preferences listed in their applications.
Students who coordinate can create a roommate group, but the names will not appear unless all parties complete their contracts. Students can also set up personal profiles, which include filling out a questionnaire and a description. Completing a personal profile allows other students to search for keywords to find potential roommates or suitemates with similar hobbies, majors and lifestyles.
As a whole, the UNK housing application operates within a system called StarRez, which Jochum said is used by the Nebraska universities. The StarRez housing application was updated because it’s at “its end of life.”
“It’s not that [the software] doesn’t allow it — it’s that in our years of experience on this, it hasn’t worked well,” Jochum said. “…It’s tedious. It’s a better practice to let [students] pick their roommate and suitemates, and then pick their building preference and then we make assignments that way.”
Huskers and Mavericks are in the same boat as Lopers, when it comes to room selections.
According to an email from UNO Housing and Residence Life, the UNO housing application does not allow students to list a specific residence hall room, but they can email requests to UNO Residence Life. An email from UNL Housing and Residence Life said students will receive access to their portal and a designated time for room selection after the application is complete.
Meanwhile, UNK students can request specific rooms by emailing housing@unk.edu.
“If anybody has a specific request — like we have current residents at Antelope and Nester who might want the same suite — there’s no problem,” Jochum said. “If they include everybody in their suitemate group on that email to that housing account, then we know everybody’s on the same page.”
Honors students can look forward to a “Choose Your Room” event at 7 p.m. on Feb. 23. According to an email from Jochum, this event was organized because Men’s Hall “has both a significant upper class and freshman population housed together, which unlike any other building.”
Similar “Sign Your Contract” events will be hosted in all of the freshman style halls, during which questions about specific room requests will be answered.
