Becoming a SailorIn short
After eleven years aboard SV Aphrodite, Betty is Queen's-bound, and first she had to rank residences in the Queen's housing lottery, which opens in mid-July. Reddit only took us so far. A short LearnLoop.Live quiz on study habits, quiet, social life and distance to classes produced a spreadsheet ranking the residences by what mattered to her. Then she was accepted into the Science Living Learning Community, on the fourth floor of Leonard Hall, and it suits her.
Queen’s Housing Lottery — 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.
What is the Queen’s housing 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. Use the radio buttons and click Continue.
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.
How the Queen’s residence lottery works
The lottery does not decide where you live; it decides when you get to choose. First-year students fill in the residence application and pay the deposit in the spring (for 2026 the deadline was June 1 at 4 pm ET, which also keeps the residence guarantee).
In early July, each student is emailed a self-selection date and time, allocated by lottery. From mid to late July, students log in at their time and pick an actual building and room from whatever is still available. An early slot means more choice; anyone who doesn’t pick a room is placed by the residence office.
A Living Learning Community changes the picture. Students can apply to one LLC on the residence application with a short written answer, and acceptances go out at the end of June, before the self-selection slots arrive.
Each LLC lives together on its own floor of a set residence, so an acceptance settles the building, as Betty found out. Dates shift a little every year, so check the Queen’s first-year residence application page for the current ones.
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