The way that housing works is that you will go to orientation as a first-year student--which is in June--and you will fill out your housing and your meal contract. Housing contract has two parts to it. The first part is roommate selection. So, you can either mutually request someone, maybe someone from high school, you both go to UVM, you can request each other, or you meet someone at orientation and you really hit it off, you can request each other. Other than that, you'll be randomly assigned a roommate. And they don't do the whole eHarmony match-up questionnaire type of thing, they just ask a few simple questions, like, "When do you typically wake up and go to bed?," if you're messy or clean, if you're a smoker or a non-smoker. You cannot smoke in any of the building on campus, but it's just a lifestyle choice, which is why they match it up that way. If you don't like your roommate, you can switch after two weeks; but they give you the two-week grace period so you can kind of get to know them, give them a chance. And then you just fill out a form--it's a pretty painless process--and they'll reassign you to a different campus, hallway, res. hall, whichever. The second part of your housing contract is room selection, where you just preference your top room type choice--so, 1, 2, 3 if you want to be in a single, double, triple, quad, four-person suite, or six-person suite.
After filling out those two forms, they will randomly assign you to any of the res. halls on the four different campuses. So, as a first-year student you don't get that much control over where you live, but one way to get control over that is to apply to themed housing, and there are so many different options for that. For example, I lived in the GreenHouse my two years on campus, which is a res. hall on the athletic campus. It's actually one of the newest res. halls, and it's all suite-style living. It's for students who are interested in the environment. We do all our own composting, we have gardens, we go on hikes; we have faculty that live in the res. hall with us to help us with various projects and field trips. We also have student-led clubs that change every year, depending on what the students want to do. We've had Photography Club, Conscious Consumers, Ecological Design, the Open Mic Night Club, the Worm Composting Bin Club--so, a bunch of different things.
There's also the health and wellness res. hall, where they have yoga and cooking classes, and they have a workout facility for students to use. There is the Dewey House for Civic Engagement, which is for students interested in community service. There is the Honors College. So, if you're invited into the Honors College, you can choose to live in their res. hall, but you're not required to. And then there's the Living and Learning complex, which is themed suites. For example, there's the Global Village in the Living and Learning--which is the Italian house, the Spanish house, the Russian house, the Canada house, the carbon house, Japanese house... You get the idea, many different-country houses. And a lot of times the students have to only speak that language. Like, in the Spanish house they only speak Spanish.
Then there are other themed suites that students apply to have approved every year. So, they change every year. There has been the Harry Potter house for Muggles, the anime suite, the tea suite, the engineering and mathematical sciences suite, dance suite, pottery suite, jewelry suite, music suite--so many different things. And all of those themed housing programs have spots open for first-year students. So, if you apply to one of those, you're going to know exactly what building you're going to be in. So, that's how you get control over where you're living as a first-year student.