Room Ballot
Posted by Martin Orr on Tuesday, 21 February 2006 at 13:50
The room ballot, when we choose our rooms for next year, will take place on 6th March. The way this works is: the second years have already made their choices and the college has allocated rooms for prospective first years, so we get what's left. We are assigned a random order, then choose rooms in that order. Next year the same list is used in reverse order, although people who get firsts are moved to the top. I am 44th out of 199 which is reasonably good.
Factors which I will consider are: (please suggest more)
- Noise - Facing onto a street is not a good thing (esp. over Sainsburys).
- Stairs - Currently I am living on the second floor and seem to go up and down those stairs a lot. However I think I would feel very strange to sleep on the ground floor.
- Bathroom - can be some distance or several flights of stairs away. (Indeed it is sometimes considered that the quality of a room is inversely proportional to the distance to a bathroom.) Having a convenient bathroom is definitely a plus.
- Kitchen - I have not made much use of the kitchen this year. I may do so more next year, especially if I live in Burrell's Field (where I have heard that they have good kitchens anyway).
- Size and sitting room - You can have either a set (separate bedroom and sitting room) or a single room. This does not much bother me, so long as there is a reasonable amount of space.
- Price - Most of the prices are in the range £590-£730 per term, which I think I can afford so I will not worry about this too much.
I mentioned Burrell's Field above. Whether I want to live in Burrell's or not is probably the biggest question I will have to answer. It is 5 minutes walk from college, and that much further from town. A lot of second years live there, especially mathmos for whom it has the attraction of being close to the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. However our second year lectures are at Mill Lane (in town) and supervisions are as likely to be in college as in the CMS so I am not sure how useful this is. The buildings in Burrell's are of an inoffensive 1990s style plus a few older houses, not architecturally brilliant but not hideous either.
The other rooms are in Whewell's Court, New Court and Blue Boar. Whewell's Court is in reality a series of three courts. The buildings are very solid and grey, the courts are pretty small and two of them have no grass and there are enclosed tunnels several metres long to get from one to the next so I don't really fancy living there. Blue Boar was built in the 1989 along with a few older buildings, broadly similar to Burrell's (although it has no green at all). It is built on top of shops, so while there may be fewer stairs inside the buildings you do have to go up a lot simply to get to your front door. Finally New Court is a decently-sized traditional court, with a (round) area of grass in the middle; although somewhat oddly there is a large tree in the centre of that. It is used as a car park for fellows: the only court in any college I have ever seen cars in. It also has the disadvantage that tourists often wander through, although they are not really supposed to. Burrell's, Whewell's and Blue Boar, like Angel Court where I live this year, are not positioned where tourists are likely to come across them.
There are also a few rooms in 4A Bridge Street and 7 Jesus Lane, out of college the opposite direction from Burrell's; which I think is definitely the wrong direction to go in. In any case there is a fourth year ballot on Thursday and they will probably all go then.
-- Martin