Why the Housing Lottery Should Count For EMR

With juniors, sophomores, and freshmen picking their housing for next year, there are a lot of conversations about which room configuration will allow for the maximum space and optimal sleeping arrangement. This involves a lot of high level mathematic skills, or at least some mathematical skills, and we believe the housing lottery should count towards the Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning Gen Ed Requirement.

Coordinating a time to talk with your group

If you want to live with a large number of people or sort out your blocking groups living situation, you all need to sit down and talk about how to conquer the housing lottery. However, in the busy time of midterm season and leading up to reading period, figuring out a time and place for everyone to congregate for this talk requires many organizational and mathematical skills. This may be extra difficult if you also need to explain why a certain person may not fit into the rooming situation for next year.

Interpreting the meaning of "n-1"

So you have five people in your group and the housing you have is n -1. So how many doubles even is that? Once you’ve figured out that complicated math (Answer: two if you want a common room, one if you don’t), you then have to make a rotation schedule and figure out how to evenly split time in the coveted singles. If that doesn’t count as mathematical reasoning, what does?

Optimizing group size for square footage

Another mathematical challenge to the housing lottery is figuring out how many people in your housing group gives you the best chance at success in the housing lottery. If there are nine quads and eight quints left, more people are housed in quints but more groups get quads, so what is the right way to split? You not only have to take into account which housing is better, but also game theory (how other people will act given your actions).

With all of this math knowledge and reasoning going on, non-STEM majors should be allowed to count participation in a Housing Lottery as their EMR Gen Ed. Besides, with Hebrew Bible losing its Gen Ed status (RIP), what better way to include another low-workload gem into the Gen Ed system?