Policy

Starting in the draw conducted in the 2008-2009 school year, the in-house draw has been standardized across all residences.  In each house, priority is determined first by seniority, then by draw number.  Thus, even if a sophomore has the highest draw number out of all the residents in a residence, he will probably be one of the last people to select their rooms.  This is because the seniors get to pick first, regardless of their draw number.  While this may seem unfair, this was an effort by the Stanford Housing department to provide better housing for upperclassmen.

Selecting a roommate

While most of you probably intend on rooming with somebody in your draw group, sometimes this may change.  In fact, the in-house draw does not mandate that you room with somebody from your draw group.  But sometimes, if you are placed in a triple and you only have one roommate, you may have to find a third roommate.  This is inevitable, and you probably will not know until a few minutes before you have to pick.  One thing you could do is to ask the appropriate housing front desk to provide a sheet listing everybody in the dorm sorted by their draw number.  This way, you can determine your chances at getting the kind of room you want, and to pick out potential candidates for a third roommate if necessary.

So what can I do to prepare for it?

    These in-house draws tend to go extremely fast.  In the larger dormitories, you can have upwards of 400 people that need to get assigned to an exact room, so each person is given only a minute or two to select their room.  This may seem like a ridiculously short amount of time to make such a big decision, but it really cannot go any slower.  As a result, it is critical that you preview the rooms ahead of time, if possible, so that you know which rooms you want, and which ones you want to avoid.  Not only will it give you a huge advantage when selecting rooms, but it will also give you an idea of what a "good" room is, and what a "bad" room is. 
    Another thing to watch out for is to ask for the floor plan in advance.  While all in-house draws will use some kind of graphic representation of the different rooms and floors, the graphics may be somewhat misleading.  For example, sometimes the resident staff will use an excel sheet to run the in-house draw, so it may be hard to judge what type of dorm a particular room is.  For example, a 2-room double may show up as one square in the spreadsheet.  To get around this, you really need to know the configuration of each room in advance.