mamamusings: April 6, 2005

i hate apartment hunting

I thought I was done with this forever…that once we bought our nice suburban house and I got tenure that we’d never have to do the apartment-hunting thing again. But I didn’t factor in sabbaticals.

So I’ve spent countless hours over the past few days bouncing between rent.com, apartments.com, and apartmentratings.com, trying to figure out where I should spend my time looking during the four days I have free in Seattle between the MSN Search Champs meeting and the MSR Social Computing Symposium this month.

All the pieces we need are out there—prices, floorplans, maps, feature guides, resident ratings. The problem is they’re not in one place, they’re not easily aggregated, and they’re nearly impossible to print in a reasonable way. That means that I had to:

1. Search in rent.com for places meeting our criteria (Lake Washington or Bellevue school districts, 3 bedrooms, reasonable floor plan, pool and playground for the kids)
2. Locate the floorplans—some were already in rent.com, others required me to go to apartments.com
3. Look up the places meeting our criteria on apartmentratings.com, in order to see how many people had taken the time to say “this place is awful”—one or two complaints is no big deal, but a bunch of them saying the same thing is bad news (like, for example, the place where five different comments said that when new management took over their water bills went up by ~$50/month!)
4. Print out the remaining options
5. Use scissors and a glue stick to literally cut and paste the floorplan pictures back together since they broke in the middle of the page

There’s really got to be a better way.

I realize this is in many ways better than it used to be—to be able to screen locations at all in advance of going out there is a great advantage, and when I get to Seattle I’ll have a good sense of what the price ranges and expectations are. But still, it’s a lengthy and tedious process, and it makes me glad we’ll be coming back home to our own house in a year.

research tidbit

I’ve been reviewing information about the students my colleague and I interviewed last year, and have found some interesting things. Keep in mind that we were working with a small sample—there were only ten women in the entering IT class last year, and eleven CS women. That makes it hard to generalize from our findings, but does give us some interesting avenues to pursue in terms of our larger survey project this spring.

Of the ten IT women interviewed, three changed programs during the first year. One transferred to Travel and Tourism, one into a transitional decision-making program and then into International Business, and one into CS. The student who transferred to CS has not enrolled for any classes since completing her freshman year.

Of the eleven CS women interviewed, four changed programs—two into IT, one into Biotechnology, and one into Sign Language Interpreting. In addition, one woman has not enrolled at RIT since completing her freshman year, and another changed from the CS BS degree program to the CS AS degree program during her sophomore year.

By comparison, none of the ten (randomly selected from a pool of 200) IT men we interviewed changed programs during their first two years. However, two of them took leaves of absence at the beginning of their sophomore years, and another was suspended and has not returned to classes.