About

The current resources provided by the University leave much to be desired. Information isn't updated frequently, meaning some of the more timely information will be incorrect. Wording on the website is constantly unclear, preferring to focus on a building's history and who it was named after rather than what it actually has to offer. Amenities lists are all incomplete on some level, and worst of all, needlessly dense PDFs (which can be strangely hard to find) are sent out every year instead of actually consolidating and improving the information on the website. Thus, as the housing lottery nears, students are left confused in an entirely different way with information overload and formats that often don't help. 

In response to these issues we created the problem statement:

How might we create a centralized digital solution to organize and elaborate on housing information so that both current and prospective U of R students can be more comfortable in their knowledge of housing options on campus?

We began working on this project almost immediately after our second class spent in iZone. Our excitement regarding the idea and how effectively it could be executed was passionate and caused us to work fervently the whole way through. We not only worked individually at every chance we reasonably could, and we not only spent all the class time we could organizing and working on it, but we also had a four hour meeting every Friday. Furthermore, we had some “specialized” meetings between some members of the group to focus work on a particular aspect of the project, such as web development and research. We also made a group chat through Discord for quick, easy, and constant communication which allowed for total transparency and contributed to the community of it all.

When building our team, we made sure that we all had diverse backgrounds in our experiences with University of Rochester housing. We had members of Special Interest Housing and Greek Life, we had D'Lions, and we also had a first year whose experiences with housing directly led to the creation of this project. 

There would be a lot of red tape and money needed to maintain this website if we were trying to link it directly to the University of Rochester website. Due to our focus on accessibility and honesty for students, we chose to personally develop this site in Google Sites. Thus, money isn't necessary to maintain the site. Anyone with a Gmail account can build, host, and maintain a Google site for free.  One resource that would be needed, however, is to get students like us who are passionate enough to maintain it and keep it up to date. We are in the process of seeing if this can be continued and built upon moving forward, whether it be by updating some of the more timely information, expanding the scope of information, or simply polishing what's already there.