Of all the milestones I imagined for our kids when we first cast off the dock lines, “choosing a university residence” was not one of them.

But here we are.

After eleven years of living aboard SV Aphrodite, Betty is Queen’s-bound. Before she can pack a box, buy bedding, or figure out what a Canadian winter coat looks like after years in the tropics, she has to get through the Queen’s University residence lottery.

For families new to this, the housing lottery opens in mid-July. It feels competitive in a way that is different from staying up well past midnight to get into a summer camp. This is not a temporary arrangement. And I want her to have the best start possible in her first year of university.

There are buildings, room types, meal halls, program locations, bathroom arrangements, quiet floors, social reputations, and the ever-present reality of walking across campus in Kingston in February. Betty is excited to see snow.

Researching residences at Queen’s

In my effort to help, I read too much.

In fact, we all did.

Reddit was helpful, to a point. Then I found myself reading about fire alarms, party floors, and people possibly lurking for laughs in the bathroom. Maybe she could live in our off-campus storage locker instead?

Betty, meanwhile, was trying to make a very normal teenage decision from a not-very-normal background. She has done school on a boat in all kinds of weather. She has stood night watches on ocean passages. She has lived with three siblings in close quarters for most of her life. And now she was supposed to rank dorms she had never seen for a version of life she has never lived.

So we made a decision matrix on paper. Then, Rick found Queen’s housing assessment from LearnLoop.Live, which is decision-support company that emulates what we were trying to do as a family, which was to help Betty narrow down her choices.

Betty took a short quiz and answered questions about how she studies, how much quiet she needs, how social she wants residence to feel, how close she wants to be to classes, and what trade-offs she is willing to make.

The useful part was that it helped her identify what she actually wanted. It was like watching Betty grow before my eyes. My girl is social and super smart, I can’t wait to see what this coming year brings.

If you are curious, you can try the LearnLoop.Live quiz for yourself here:

The tool also produced a decision-support spreadsheet, ranking the Queen’s residences against the things that mattered to her: location, room type, quiet, social life, cost, and fit.

With the spreadsheet, the air suddenly changed from being a disjointed cacophony of social media influencers giving tours of their bedrooms to something a little calmer.

Then after all that thinking and planning, Queen’s sent Betty an email.

Congratulations, Betty: A New Member of the Queen’s Science LLC

Betty was accepted into the Science Living Learning Community. Given that she has had her sights on medical school since the AidOcean medical mission she joined in Papua New Guinea at seventeen, the Science LLC felt like a good fit.

The Science LLC is housed together on the fourth floor of Leonard Hall.

So after all the ranking, weighing, comparing, and overthinking, the answer was Leonard.

Was the assessment still worth doing?

Yes.

It helped Betty understand what she wanted from first year. It gave us a way to talk about residence without turning the whole thing into a fog of parental anxiety. And when Leonard Hall became the answer, she could see that it was not a bad answer. It actually suited her.

This whole process has been strange, occasionally stressful, and very much a rite of passage.

If your family is also navigating the Queen’s housing lottery, I would love to know how you chose — or whether, like us, the decision chose you.