THE ISSUE: Housing and Residence Life started a new process for room assignments this semester that allows students to choose their dorm room and roommate without the middleman of HRL.

OUR VIEW: The new selection process for assigning rooms in dorms has run smoothly so far. HRL successfully removed the bureaucratic system of room assignments, and students seem to like the process.

Back in the day — mostly during the settlement days of the Old West era in the United States — a “squatter” was a person living on someone else’s land who deserved to be put in jail.

“Squatting” has a whole new meaning on campus. HRL uses the term to reference a student who wants to keep living in the same room in the same dorm for the following year.

The system works through TopNet and has been successful so far in allowing students to choose where they’ll live on campus the following year.

It lets students view rooms available in every dorm and to “jump” into a room. Once someone has jumped into a room, they can pull another person into the room with them by entering a code.

Students can view their roommate assignments immediately — much better than the suspenseful wait to see where they’ll live and with whom.

The process allows students to work with their friends to set up rooms close to each other.

Unfortunately, networking around a specific group of people doesn’t encourage students to meet new people and could take away from the on-campus experience HRL promotes.

But this program is still a good move because it allows students to have more control of their living arrangements. A bad experience in the dorm can make a student’s semester miserable.

Some students may not have a roommate in mind and will have to jump into a room without knowing their future. This is almost the same as the housing policy before, only the students will at least have control over what room they have.

Some students who jump into rooms don’t pull someone in quickly enough and discover they already have a roommate.

If either of those two situations happen, Western should utilize Lifetopia — a Web site that allows viewers to read a brief synopsis of their roommate and discover the person’s interests.

So thank you, HRL, for finally simplifying the room assignment process and making “squatting” into a positive thing.

This editorial represents the majority opinion of the Herald’s 11-member editorial board.