Thursday, April 10, 2008

Housing, Admissions, this one’s for you!

So Max’s post (Questions for GW's Director of Housing Assignments) got me thinking.

I wasn’t one of housing’s victims this year. I’m in an Ivory double next year. I’m pleased. But we all know housing could use some improvements. If you’ve been to the GW Home and Campus webpage lately, you’ll notice something.

First of all, you can’t even get to this website without having already put it on favorites. (If you can navigate to it from housing’s website, let me know). Second of all, let’s discuss the inefficiency. Click on Fulbright.

You see a close-up picture of three girls, one of which doesn’t seem to wanna be there. Are they trying to market it as an all-girls study dorm? Where is the room? Back in the day (a.k.a 2006) you could see 360 degree virtual tours of the rooms.

On Harvard’s admissions page, you can see videos of students in their dorm rooms.

Why don’t we have that? GW Admission’s reaction? One “haha” and an unspoken “We don’t have the time/money.” WRONG! Yes we have the money and I’m sure if you asked one of the unpaid tour guides, they’d probably volunteer to make a video in their spare time.

Liz didn’t get Gdub’s approval first. She made her own YouTube video featuring her Thurston room.

This guy, whose video is titled “Mitchell hall sucks,” clearly isn’t happy with his living arrangement.

So GW, housing and admissions in particular, a small request. Think about all of those prospective students who see Harvard’s videos and then “Mitchell Hall sucks.” Why not have your own videos on GW’s site? It might help with the whole “we’re worth 50 grand” pitch you make every day. Let’s ask Seth D. Weinshel to get on that. Hey Max, add that one to the list.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Seth: What is good about GW?

Ha, trick question!

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with this. When I applied (Fall '05) we were able to see 360 views of almost all the dorm rooms. The cost to reinstate these videos would be negligible and the opportunity to see views of perspective dorm rooms seems entirely reasonable, if not common courtesy.

Anonymous said...

they're actually in the process of moving to a new website, http://living.gwu.edu/

it supposed to integrate RPM, Housing, and all the other random departments to make it easier and more efficient to find information. the new site still isn't great, but that at least explains why the other sites aren't as accessible/informative.