0-Round Pull into Case!

The title of this post needs explaining. A lot of explaining. It is thick with jargon and contextual knowledge. I'll explain it backwards, starting with the meaning and then describing how I got there. The statement means that one of my friends will be proctor of Case next year and that I will be living with him or her. Case is one of our dorms, so that's easy. What does "pull" mean?

At Harvey Mudd College, rooms for everyone except the freshmen are decided through a process called "room draw". In the simplest form, everyone is assigned a number and then goes in order picking which room he or she wants to live in next year. Numbers are assigned randomly (I think) among the members of each class; thus, rising seniors get first pick, juniors next, and sophomores last. When you pick a room, the verb we use is "pull". You can also "pull" a roommate or suitemate (which, I believe, is where the term came from -- you get a room and pull a buddy with you). If you choose a double or triple, you must fill the room, so you write down your name and the names of your roommate(s). When you pull a single, the system is kind so it lets you bring a friend to live in the room next to you.

Seniors are slightly different in that there are 3 rounds of Senior room draw. In an effort to make sure that seniors get to live where they want to, Senior draw is divided into first-round, second-round, and third-round. During first-round, all the rising seniors who currently live in a dorm get to pull into that dorm before rising seniors with better numbers who don't live in the dorm. This is called "in-dorm status" and is the center of much maneuvering during junior draw. The second round is for out of dorm seniors, and the third round is for seniors pulling underclassmen. Confused yet? The worst is over.

The title claims that I got pulled into Case, but it claims I got a "0-Round" pull. I said there were only first- second- and third- round pulls, though! Some rooms are preplaced. A number of rooms each year in each dorm are reserved for incoming freshmen or transfer students and some people petition to live in rooms with certain characteristics because of medical needs (a med-pull, commonly used to get a room with a kitchen for people with food restrictions). One or two rooms in each dorm are the proctors' rooms. Each dorm has at least one proctor (Case and Atwood have two each) and he or she is allowed to pull a friend just like everyone else. That friend is placed in what's called the 0-Round since it happens before the seniors' first-round.

We've explained the title now, but what's a proctor? The proctor is Mudd's equivalent to the RA. They keep an eye on the students and make sure that no huge problems surface. They are the people you can talk to when you have problems, be they fights with friends, noisy neighbors, stress from homework or more touchy issues relating to drugs/alcohol/sex or whatever else you might come across in your first years away from home. The difference between the proctors and most RA's is that the proctors are not here to report your actions to the authorities; they are not responsible for getting you in trouble. They're here for when you need them, whether as someone to talk to, someone to support you when confronting said noisy neighbors, or someone to help you notice, if not avoid, the pitfalls in the rocky road of life. Proctors do report directly to the deans, but they're not interested in getting people in trouble. Their job is to keep the school healthy, physically and emotionally, by collectively watching every student on campus to make sure everything is okay and helping us when nothing is okay. That's a tall enough order as it is, and if you add "tattle-tale" to the job description you've created a paradox in which people should feel comfortable going to the proctors for help, but are afraid of getting in trouble if they do. As an example of the sort of thing the proctors do, after last year's shooting at Virginia Tech our deans and proctors holed up together and spent hours compiling a list of all the people on Mudd who showed warning signs of being depressed, unstable, friendless, or otherwise in the slightest danger of becoming dangerous. (For what it's worth, the list was empty).

Two of my closest friends here at Mudd -- actually the two closest outside of my girlfriend -- have been proctors; one of the juniors I lived with when I first arrived at Mudd who really embodied the spirit of the place for me went on to become a proctor the following year and just last week my roommate, with whom I have shared a room since we came to Mudd nearly three years ago, has been made proctor of Case. I'm a bit disappointed that he didn't get Atwood, but Case is workable and he's been walking on clouds ever since, so when I see you next year, come visit me in Case.

~KMarsh