Following the changes brought about by the Housing Master Plan last year, the Draw will again undergo some changes as students begin to rank their housing preferences for 2010-11, including a new feature allowing students to rank which room type they prefer.

The move gives undergraduates 180 housing options to rank by May 9.

The new draw process has brought more positive feedback by students than in past years, according to Rodger Whitney, the executive director of Student Housing. The option to choose a preferred room type may also help students choose whether room type or residence location is more important overall.

With this change, Housing will now be able to “offer students participating in the Draw ‘premier’ housing, such as single rooms or two-room doubles or apartments, for two of their three upperclass years,” according to Whitney.

Many of the changes this year are a continuation of the Housing Master Plan implemented in 2009. Housing last summer took on an “unstuffing” effort with the opening of Munger Graduate Residences, which can house 600 graduate students, and the conversion of Crothers Hall from graduate to undergraduate housing. Crothers currently houses 376 undergraduate students.

Next year, Whitney said, about 60 undergraduate upperclassmen could live in the now-graduate Rains apartments, with preference to those 21 and older. This move initially met with resistance from graduate students; Housing later said it would assign undergraduates to two buildings in Rains that were less disruptive to the existing graduate community there.

He added that housing in Oak Creek would continue to be offered.

Renovations are set to take place during the summer months in Casa Italiana, Bob and Storey, but will not affect the draw process, according to Housing.

In addition to work in these three residences, Whitney said the Housing Capital Improvement Program is also expected to include “the remodeling of bathrooms, addition of sprinklers and refreshing of student rooms” in Soto and Trancos, as well as “the addition of card access to the remaining large residences on the east side of campus, including Mirrielees, Toyon and Manzanita Park.”

Other changes include giving automatic priorities to three- or six-person groups applying to live in the Governor’s Corner six-person suites and limiting gender-neutral assignments in Suites to four-person units in response to several problems that arose this year.

“A decision was made as a result of the difficulties caused when someone leaves a gender-neutral suite mid-year and the assignment must revert back to single sex, since [Housing does] not randomly assign residents to gender-neutral dorms,” said Whitney.

Whitney said Housing is trying to better support graduate students, who may now stay in housing for six years as long as they are enrolled.

Students last year faced a new option to rank their preferences among all residences. According to Whitney, having a limited amount of residence choices “caused the students to have to do a lot of strategizing about which residences they might have the opportunity to live in, based on the random draw number they were assigned”–a contributor to the yearly ritual known as “drawma.”

The draw has three tiers. Tier three has the highest–or worst–draw numbers, while tier one has the lowest and most preferable. Rising sophomores are not allowed to use tier one. Students can use tier one and tier two only once each.

“The seniors are now caught between the two systems, the old way and the new way,” said Natalie Goodis ’11, who is about to draw using tier one.

“The new system guarantees you draw a number between one and a thousand, so I will be guaranteed to be somewhere I like,” she added.

Housing preferences opened April 14 and close May 9.