Graduate Student Office Committee

Policies

Introduction
Priority Ranking
Research Clustering Constraints
Office Assignment Criteria
Sharing Offices
First Year Students
Special Cases
Desk Assignment Within an Office
Key Deposit

Introduction

The Office Committee is a committee normally composed of two students and one administrative person set up to deal with student office assignment for the CIS department. The role of the administrative person is to collect information about office space being freed, to coordinate the handling and receiving of keys, and to deal with other, related matters. The role of the student(s) is to maintain this website, hold an office assignment lottery (administered via this website), and process the data on current students to determine who can be put into the available office space.

The following policy statement concerns the assignment of offices for CIS graduate students only. Allotment of offices for others such as visiting scholars or post-doctoral students is handled by the faculty. This committee has jurisdiction over all Computer Science graduate student offices in the Moore GRW and Levine buildings. Offices within laboratories are outside the control of the committee.

Once a year (or once a semester if necessary) the Office Committee makes a major offering of office space. This offering is based on those desks that have been vacated since the last allocation due to graduation, attrition, or other means. At that time students interested in one of the available spaces are asked to apply to the committee, supplying a collection of relevant data. The students are then ranked as described below, and the assignments made.

Once a Ph.D. student has received an office assignment, it is theirs to keep as long as they remain a full-time student. (If the student is in an office which is reserved for students in a particular research area, and the student changes to a different area, then they may be asked to change offices in the next lottery process.)

In general, as long as you are happy with your office, you need not reapply to the committee. You will be asked via e-mail if you would like to retain your office.

If a student has the option of retaining his or her office but instead decides to try for a better space, then he or she will need to apply in "Phase I" of the lottery process, in which students with offices are asked if they wish to place them in the pool.

As in previous years, we are unable to offer offices to Master's students. We encourage you to use the recently renovated Moore 207.

Incoming first-year students are assigned to a special office space in the large center office in the basement of Moore GRW. These new first-year students DO NOT need to participate in the lottery process since their spaces are already reserved and allocated automatically.

While most of the process flows as described in this note, nothing is ever that simple. Therefore, the committee will also decide on special cases (described below), complaints and rejection cases. The committee reserves the right to modify assignments made by the allocation algorithm in order to satisfy special circumstances.

Priority Ranking

The principle factor in the ranking of students for office allocation is academic standing in the department in terms of progress made towards a Ph.D. degree. Full-time Ph.D. students are given absolute priority in the office allocation process.

Since part time students are presumably less often on campus, they have 0 priority unless they become full time at which point there priority is determined in terms of the number of courses they have taken (as described below).

The exception to this last rule is that during any semester that a part-time student is fulfilling the teaching practicum, they are treated as though they were full-time. This is done since teaching assistants must have a place to meet with students. The allocation is, however, good only for as long as they are doing teaching practicum, and must be surrendered at the end of the semester.

If you received your MS at Penn before entering the PhD program, the semesters you attended while in the Masters program are only counted if they immediately preceded your entry into the PhD program.

Ties are broken on a random basis.

Ranking Summary

For the purposes of the office lottery, there are two types of students:

Full-time Ph.D. students.
Masters students. (Masters students will not be participating in the summer 2004 lottery.)

Type 1 students are given priority over Type 2 students, etc. The list of applicants is first sorted by type, then the list of students within each type is sorted according the number of points each student has, as determined by the points critera below.

The office committee will then start at the top of this doubly-sorted list, assigning each student his or her most preferred office that is still available in the pool. The assignments into an office are also subject to the research clustering legality constraints, as explained below.

If there happen to be more students requesting offices than there are spaces, then before the assignment algorithm begins, those "overflow" junior students at the bottom of the sorted list will be removed from the list since it would not be possible for them to receive an office. (It is the hope of the Office Committee that enough spaces will be available for all those full-time PhD students who request it, but this may not always be possible.) In this fashion, the determination of which students will receive an office is made at the very beginning of the allocation algorithm. The remainder of the algorithm merely determines where particular students will be located.

Research Clustering Criteria

The office space on the 5th and 6th floors of Levine and the 4th and 5th floor of GRW is particularly intended for students whose advisors will also be seated on those floors. (Students are thus grouped into "research clusters" according to their advisor's area of research. If there is insufficient room for students on a particular floor, then a satelite research cluster area may be established on a different floor to allow students with similar research areas to sit together.) As the doubly sorted list is traversed in the assignment algorithm for the first time, only students whose advisor is on that floor will be considered "legal" for that office. Students whose advisors are not on these special floors will be placed in general office spaces or (if all general space has been exhausted during the course of the assignment algorithm) will be placed on a "reserve list." (Since "overflow" junior students had been trimmed from the list previously, all students placed temporarily on this "reserve list" will receive an office.)

After the sorted list has been traversed, these students on the reserve list will be placed into offices in order of their seniority. At this time in the allocation algorithm, the clustering constraint "legality" can be violated. These students' office preferences will be followed as closely as possible to place them in the remaining "holes" in the previously "reserved" offices. For these students on the "reserve list," in the absence of other considerations, an effort may be made to group these students into clusters of their own or to place them in desks in "reserved" offices that are as close as possible to their research area.

Office Assignment Criteria

The following enumerates the criteria by which we assign points:

1/3 for each WPE I section
1 for WPE II
1/2 for each teaching practicum point
1 for dissertation proposal
1 for each completed full-time semester (this does not include the current semester or any summers)
1/3 for each completed part-time course (this does not include the current semester)
1 for current TA (this does not apply if you are grading and do not have teaching responsibilities)
1 for any student currently serving on the Office Committee.

Sharing Offices

It often happens that two students wish to share an office together. The Committee will try to take such desires into account. In general, though, we will not allow such desires to boost a lower ranked student over a higher ranked one. Taking the research clustering criteria into account, students should realize that it may be difficult to share an office with a student in a very different research area.

First Year Students

Because many first year students are not certain or change their minds about what area they wish to work in, the students and faculty felt it would be better for all concerned if first year students were not immediately placed into office space that is associated with a particular lab. This would allow students to more easily interact with persons in other areas and leave some room for maneuvering.

We also feel that it is important that all the first year students get to know each other - during the first year you meet lots of people in areas not in your field of interest and after the first year most people split off into assorted specialized areas and don't usually interact with persons from other specializations.

We are currently in the process of renovating the large basement offices of GRW and will make them immediately available to the first year students this fall. This will remove all first year PhD students from the fall lottery and give them offices immediately upon their arrival.

Special Cases

Students who are accepted to the department into an advanced level should fall in this category. If the faculty strongly feels that certain person should be dealt with as a special case, they can bring the case to the committee who will decide upon it.

Desk Assignment Within an Office

Desk assignments within an office should be handled internally, in some manner deemed equitable by the students involved. Students already residing in a given office should have priority in selecting a desk over incoming students. We would encourage students in large eight-person offices to select desks near to other students in similar research areas whom they may confer or collaborate with.

Key Deposit

A deposit of $10 will be asked of all students picking up an office key. This deposit will be refunded upon returning the key at the time of move out or office change. (If you lose your key, you will be charged an additional $10.) The people to contact regarding office keys are Jennifer Finley in Levine 302 or Rita Powell, Office Manager. No student will be allowed a key to a student office until the Office Committee has sent an authorization e-mail to Ms. Finley.

Problems

For office repairs, cleaning or maintenance, or any other physical problems with an office, contact Janean Williams, janeanw@cis or 8-5515.