February 21, 2022
College is full of people who have information that they think is very important to you. And usually, it comes in the form of an email.
For Tufts Residential Life, this information is a description of how the housing selection process for next year works. Iâd gotten a lottery number a month ago, and had a vague idea of how suites and rooms work for sophomores, but I didnât really understand the process.
Then, I got an email from Residential Life telling us about four live Zoom webinars they were running in order to explain the process and answer questions.
I went to one, and when the hour was up, my roommate came back. He asked if there was anything he should know from the webinar, and explaining it to him took a minute or two.
Really? Information that couldâve been boiled down to a couple minutes took an hour to disseminate live. Someone had to sit there and click through a presentation for an hour to get this to me.
Thereâs got to be more efficient ways of distributing information to a large population.
As an experiment, let me try to explain to you everything you need to know about Tuftsâ housing process:
Thereâs a couple days at the end of March where you form your group. Each day is for forming a different-sized group: the first is ten-person groups, then singles, etc. At the end of each day, they tell you based on your lottery number whether your group will work. So if thereâs 40 ten-person suites available and 45 groups try to form, the 5 groups with the worst lottery numbers will be told to try a different configuration in the coming days. The dates for group formation are on a website, Iâm sure you can find them by searching.
So by the end of those days, you know what type of housing youâre getting, just not which exact room. Then youâre given a date and time to select the exact room or suite that you want, and your âgroup leaderâ picks that at the designated time.
It really isnât that much information. And Iâm sure I couldâve condensed this better, but Iâm lazy and not willing to put that much effort into this thought experiment.
So whyâd that take an hour?
They spent a ton of time going over the exact dates for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. I have retained nothing except for that the dates for sophomores were March 20-something?
So donât tell me these things. Iâm not gonna retain the exact details. Instead, tell me how to find them. Itâs all on the internet!
And for the love of god please donât put a URL on the slide. I can barely remember the names of my professors from last semester. Iâm never gonna remember your (ugly-looking) URL.
Instead, just tell me to google it. Iâll probably be able to find it. Problem solved.
I think that often these presentations come out of not wanting to boil down information so far that it even feels like itâs too little. Youâre intentionally leaving things out!
But thatâs okay. Thatâs what you have the website for. Thatâs why people can contact you with questions.
By going in the information-stuffing direction, and throwing in every single detail that you possibly can, youâre being inconsiderate.
If people come, youâre wasting a month of combined human time on this single webinar, because you couldnât condense the information such that itâd be reasonable.
But more likely, people just arenât gonna show up. The housing webinar I attended, the first of four, had less than 30 people in attendance. Since theyâre forcing people to digest this information in a one-hour live session, people just arenât getting the information at all. And thatâs counter-productive to what theyâre trying to do (I hope?).
Perhaps another argument for a live webinar is that people can ask questions that they have. Which is fair! People always have questions about a complicated process like this.
But a good FAQ on a website will do just as well, and you can have people email if they have further questions. And if someone emails a question you forgot about, you can add it to the FAQ!
Even better, youâll be able to have a library of questions and answers to carry from year to year. You donât have to rely on someone asking every good question during every webinar.
The reason why information distribution is usually bad is that thereâs nothing forcing it to be good. Nothing bad really happens if you present housing information badly. Thereâs a bunch of confused people, but theyâll figure it out eventually. Or they wonât. Either way, Residential Life isnât really impacted.
So in all likelihood, these kinds of things will continue to be mediocre. But itâs fun to dream about how they could be better, and complain from the outside without actually having to do the work of making it better.