We’ve slowly been gearing up for this coming housing season by covering the more colorful aspects of the housing process. Alas, the time draws nigh when you will be forced to finally make your housing choice official. Registration begins on February 29th and closes March 8th. Below, we’ve distilled a cursory overview of the entire housing process. Continue to ask questions in the comments, and feel free to share any nuggets of wisdom, upperclassmen.

1. Registration (Feb. 29th) Everyone registers. You can either do Suite Selection with 1 to 7 other people or go straight to General Selection. If you opt for Suite Selection, you get to participate in General Selection with the same lottery number if you decide not to make a room choice during Suite Selection or if there is no suite available for your group size. Each group must have a person picked as the “coordinator” to act as a point person.
2. Numbers (Mar. 21st): Lottery and priority numbers are assigned. Each group (Suite) or person (General) is assigned a priority number and a lottery number. Priority: 10 = rising sophomore, 20 = rising junior, 30 = rising senior (based on the semester you started at Columbia, not on your current standing). For a group, the group priority is the average of all the group members’ priorities (i.e. a group of 2 sophomores and 2 juniors would have a priority number of 15). Lottery numbers are assigned to each group in Suite Selection and each individual in General Selection at random from 1-3000. They are independent of priority numbers.
3. Appointment Times (Mar. 26th): Your Suite Selection appointments times are then assigned first by priority number then by lottery number. So, ignoring mixed class groups, all seniors pick before all juniors, who pick before all sophomores. After you get your appointment times, you’re locked in and have to wait until the actual Suite Selection process. Read Bwog every day during Suite Selection for our updates about the remaining suites available.
4. Regrouping (Apr. 2-10): At the end of their respective class-based priority appointment times (end of all 30-point groups, and then end of all 20-point groups), seniors and juniors may regroup with other class members to form new configurations with new randomly-assigned lottery numbers valid only for the regroup process. If a group still fails to select a suite, they then fall to General Selection with their original priority and lottery number. At the end of the 10-point priority appointment times, 10-point groups may split into group of two to pick into corridor doubles. Otherwise, they also drop to General Selection.
5. General Selection (Apr. 18-30): After the hullabaloo of Suite Selection, General Selection appointment times are posted. General Selection is done online, not in person. How appropriate.
6. The Dregs (May 1st): After selection is over, some sophomores will be left without a room. If  you did not get assigned a room, you go on a wait list and get whatever is left over after Housing makes final assignments. If you do not like your room selection, you may apply for summer transfer. The people who apply for summer transfer get to pick again in reverse-Lottery number order.

Recycling at Columbia is complicated. Each campus has different rules that often differ from municipal laws or our hometown laws.

Bwog spoke with Cathy Resler from the office of Environmental Stewardship to find out more. Simply put, Barnard College recycles everything. Columbia’s Morningside campus, however, follows city laws.

The flowcharts often posted near recycling centers are too long and detailed for most people to bother with, and as a result, recyclables are often contaminated with unrecyclable materials.

To simplify your life, we have created a Handy Flowchart Thinger that should answer the constant question, “Can I recycle this?” Beware, this chart is only valid for the main Columbia Campus–not TC, MC, or Lamont-Doherty (click here for a printable black-on-white version):

Click for a large pretty PDF.

“But why,” you ask, “does Columbia only recycle certain materials?” We answer that question after the jump.

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Welcome to the Columbia Olympics. Through this series, Bwog hopes to prepare you for at least some of the events that you will participate in at Columbia. Unlike the real Olympics, no one’s too young, too old, too juiced, or too angry to participate. Since everything must be judged, though, we have included gold medal outcomes at the end of each post.

Protesters. While college students worldwide in general have long been associated with protesting, no school is more famous for its protesters than Columbia. Throughout the last century, many of the biggest stories have centered around protests, or at least the controversies being protested. Many of you have probably dealt with relatives or neighbors who only know Columbia as “that crazy school with all those building takeovers,” and then you have to explain to them over Thanksgiving dinner that you really like the school, and then they say that they wouldn’t go there, and the whole conversation that was going so well gets all awkward. Not that that happened to us…

Anyways, Bwog wants to help by explaining some basic facts about protesting and dealing with protesters. Use the comments to add your own advice.

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Welcome to the Columbia Olympics. Through this series, Bwog hopes to prepare you for at least some of the events that you will participate in at Columbia. Unlike the real Olympics, no one’s too young, too old, too juiced, or too angry to participate. Since everything must be judged, though, we have included gold medal outcomes at the end of each post.

Thanks to the constantly long lines on move-in day, and the rather packed schedule at the start of Orientation Week, many first-years (Columbia-speak for freshmen) no doubt are still contemplating just how to make that special 110 ft. single or half of the 215 sq ft. double their own. How does one turn that whitewashed cell into a new home? Use the comments to add your own advice.

• Decide immediately whether you want to loft your bed or put it on risers. Even if you don’t want the extra space (or can’t leap in and out of a lofted bed), you don’t want to have to rearrange everything later.
• Use every corner and every tabletop of space for bins, refrigerators, etc.
  
• Know how to loft a bed – nobody wants to start their college experience with their father in the hospital with a gash from a falling bed frame.
• If you didn’t loot your local Virgin megastore for cool posters (or are ambivalent about defining your identity so early in the year), a New York subway map looks good on any prison wall (and is actually pretty useful when first adjusting to the city).
  
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