Group registration for the 2013 Housing cycle has begun: you have until Thursday to make friends. And with a new year of Columbia housing comes a new list of questions, concerns, and general perplexities. We’re here to help — send in all your housing related inquiries to housing@bwog.com for the best answer we can come up with. Hopefully, it’ll be generally correct. The question we’ve heard from anxious freshpersons (and everyone, really) the most often recently: is bigger better? 

Question: Will registering for housing as a larger group increase my chances of getting a good lottery number?

Answer: No. Contrary to somewhat popular belief, groups of eight don’t have any better chances in the lottery than groups of two. Instead of every individual being assigned a lottery number and the most desirable number being chosen as the group’s assignment (which is totally how one Bwogger thought it worked last year and hence rushed for a group of eight), the entire group gets one number from the outset. Assignments do not take group sizes into account and instead just randomly gives every group a number.  So you have no pressure to make nice with a large group of randos.  Chances are, as a freshperson, you’ll be living in a double.  Unless you have high hopes, a streak of good luck, or a group of friends pre-paired-up that all want to live in the same hallway and pick at the same time (i.e. you were already planning on going in with a big group of BFFS), you might as well group with only one friend.