House system at the California Institute of Technology

thumb|300px|The exterior of Ricketts House, typical of the architecture of the 1931 Spanish-style south houses as seen in 2004

The house system is the basis of undergraduate student residence at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Caltech's unique house system is modeled after the residential college system of Oxford and Cambridge in England, although the houses are probably more similar in size and character to the Yale University residential colleges and Harvard University house system. Like a residential college, a house embodies two closely connected concepts: it serves as both a physical building where a majority of its members reside and as the center of social activity for its members. Houses also serve as part of the student government system, each house having rules for its own self-government and also serving as constituencies for committees of the campus-wide student governments, the Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology, incorporated (ASCIT) and the Interhouse Committee (IHC).

The houses resemble fraternities at other American universities in the shared loyalties they engender. Unlike in fraternities, however, potentially dangerous "rushing" or "pledging" is replaced with two weeks of "Rotation" at the beginning of a student's freshman year, and students generally remain affiliated with one house for the duration of their undergraduate studies.

Freshmen have historically gone through a process known as Rotation for a week before term through the first week of classes, leading to their eventual house assignment by way of a matching process. This process has rules associated with it to try to give freshmen a chance to choose among the houses in an unbiased way. The fraternities were as follows:

Blacker: Phi Alpha Rho, also known as Pharo
Dabney: Gamma Sigma
Fleming: Sigma Alpha Pi and Pi Alpha Tau
Ricketts: Kappa Gamma, also known as Gnome

Expanding student population was accommodated in 1960 with the new houses, or north houses: Lloyd House, Page House, and Ruddock House (later renamed to Venerable House).

A new state-of-the-art residential facility named Avery House, was opened in 1996, touted as a facility that allowed undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty to not only mingle, but live together. As a result, Avery was not initially considered part of the house system, and freshmen were not allowed to live there. In the 2003–2004 school year, the Avery Council (the student government of Avery House) campaigned for Avery to participate in Rotation and take freshmen. This change was opposed by the Caltech undergraduate student body by a five-to-one margin, but the Faculty Board voted overwhelmingly to approve the change. Beginning in the 2005–2006 school year, freshmen began to rotate into Avery, changing its status to a fully represented house.

Also in 2005, work began on a major renovation project for the aging south houses, whose residents were relocated to a temporary modular housing complex. The renovations were completed at the beginning of the 2007 calendar year. Students moved back into the south houses on 15 December 2006, though construction continued through the beginning of 2007.

Like most of the older buildings on campus, Avery House and the south houses are in California Mission style, and resemble cloistered monasteries with enclosed courtyards; the north houses are of Modern design.

House memberships

There are two ways to gain membership in a house: rotate in at the beginning of one's freshman year and become a full member, or become a social or full member afterwards. Procedures for admitting new members vary depending upon house bylaws and type of membership.

Rotation

Rotation is the process by which incoming freshmen choose (and are chosen by) the house they will be affiliated with. In Caltech parlance, freshmen are called "frosh" and are referred to as "prefrosh" until the revelation of their house affiliation at the end of rotation. Upon first arriving at Caltech, the incoming freshmen are given a random room assignment in a random house that is different from their Prefrosh Weekend assignment, and then spend a week eating mainly dinner and dessert in all of the houses, getting an opportunity to meet people in all of the houses.

These meals and meetings are an opportunity both for the prefrosh to get to know the feel of the different houses and for the upperclassmen to meet and form opinions on the prefrosh so both can see where they might belong. Many houses also show house-made videos to the prefrosh, which yield the prefrosh additional information about the various personalities of the houses. At the end of this week, the frosh rate each of the eight houses in order of preference. Based on this, and the opinions of the houses' existing members, the prefrosh are placed into a house which will be their home physically and socially for the next few years. The Interhouse Committee attempts to ensure a certain level of secrecy regarding the exact process, so that the confidentiality of both the freshmen and those involved with their final housing assignments is maintained.

| Go Big Red or FEIF (Fleming Eats It Faster) [now somewhat infrequent]

| Let the deed shaw

| https://fleming.sites.caltech.edu/

|| Ricketts House

| Skurves / Scurves

|style="background:#800000; color:white;"| Maroon

| Ranked pairs

| FGD

| Prend moi tel que je suis "Take me as I am"

| http://ricketts.caltech.edu/

! colspan="7"| North houses

|| Lloyd House

| Lloydies

|style="background:#ffc000;"| Gold

| Instant runoff voting (single-winner elections) and single transferable vote (multi-winner elections)

| Lloyd sucks!

| I live and die for those I love

| http://lloyd.caltech.edu/

|| Page House

| Pageboy (gender neutral)

|style="background:#0000ff; color:white;"| Blue

| Hybrid of two-round system and exhaustive ballot in which all but the top two candidates are eliminated after the first found of voting unless the third place candidate receives at least 80% as many votes as the second place candidate

| Thank You For Not Sucking!

| Spe labor levis, (Et spe vinum gravis) "May the work be light (and the drinks be heavy)"

| http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jrpage/

|| Venerable House

| Vens

|style="background:#0f305d; color:white;"| Navy blue

| Ranked pairs, except for Board of Control representatives elected by two-winner instant runoff

| The People (QED)

| Aut viam inveniam aut faciam "Either I will find a way, or I will make a way"

| http://venerable.caltech.edu/

! colspan="7"| Other

|| Avery House

| Averites

|style="background:#a279b6; color:white;"| Purple

| Instant runoff (single-winner elections) and single transferable vote (multi-winner elections)

| A very fine house

| Creativity, integrity, tenacity

| http://avery.caltech.edu/

South houses

The south house complex opened in 1931. The South houses sometimes style themselves as "hovses," in the Latin tradition of using the letters "v" and "u" interchangeably, as the names on the buildings are written using the letter "v".

Blacker House

thumb|300px|Blacker courtyard in 2008

Blacker House was built with the help of funds donated by Robert Roe Blacker, a trustee of Caltech. Members of Blacker House are referred to as Moles.

One of the traditions of Blacker House is the hellride. In a defiant response to the prohibition against playing Ride of the Valkyries, the freshmen living in a part of the house named Hell (so called for its unbearable heat in the summer and cramped quarters) would announce a hellride. They then barricade the hallway and play the "Ride" at high volume, daring the upperclassmen to break in and drag everyone to be drenched in the showers.

Blacker House features halls painted as Heaven and Hell, as well as a small lounge and kitchenette in between them known as Purgatory. Blacker's courtyard formerly featured a habitable treehouse and a giant tire swing, but the tree that bore them was cut down during renovations of the house in the 2005–2006 academic year. Attached to another tree was another wooden swing, but that was cut down in 2019. In another side of the courtyard is a couch swing.

thumb|right|300px|The Blacker House slogan γδβγ mysteriously appears on a camera calibration target on NASA's [[Mars Science Laboratory|Curiosity rover. If anyone at the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory knows how it got there, they aren't telling]] The letters of Blacker House are γδβγ (Greek letters for gdbg, or God damn Blacker gang). The story is that in 1978 or 1979, it was popular for Blacker students to climb on top of elevators and ride them. One time, security went inside the elevator looking for the students, who were on top of the elevator. The security muttered, "God damn Blacker gang", and the phrase stuck. Blacker students began signing GDBG or γδβγ on all their pranks. Blacker has also been referred to as the house of fucking geniuses and the inscription HOFG can be found throughout the tunnels along with γδβγ. In the 1960s the house slogan was "Blacker House for gracious living" which became "the house of gracious living" by the 1990s.

Notable alumni include:

William Shockley (1932) co-inventor of the transistor and Nobel laureate
Walter Munk (1939) oceanographer who determined the reason for the moon's tidal locking with earth
Carver Mead (1956) a key pioneer of modern microelectronics
Kip Thorne (1962) Nobel Laureate and one of the world's leading experts on the astrophysical implications of Einstein's general theory of relativity, Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus at Caltech
Michael Aschbacher (1966) an American mathematician best known for his work on finite groups
Joseph Rhodes Jr. (1969, History) Pennsylvanian politician and activist
Joseph Polchinski (1975) known for D-branes in string theory
Zinovy Reichstein (1983, Mathematics) Mathematician, known for introducing the essential dimension
Ian Agol (1992, Mathematics) Mathematician known for work in topology, professor at the University of California, Berkeley
Doris Tsao (1997) MacArthur Fellow, Neuroscientist, Professor of Biology at Caltech
Po-Shen Loh (2004, Mathematics) Professor of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, coach of USA International Math Olympiad team
SethBling (2009, Computer Science) video game YouTuber known for Minecraft redstone and speedrunning
Marissa Weichman (2008, Chemistry) Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University

Dabney House

thumb|300px|Dabney courtyard in 2008

Dabney House is the smallest of Caltech's houses. Members of Dabney House are referred to as Darbs, a combination of the name of the house with a 1920s slang term darb, meaning something or someone very handsome, valuable, attractive, or otherwise excellent. Joseph B. Dabney, owner of the Dabney Oil Syndicate, was a trustee of California Institute of Technology. Dabney Hall of the Humanities, a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Dabney, is one of the four corner buildings of Caltech's central courtyard. It was built in 1927. In 1928, the Dabneys gave $200,000 to build Dabney House, one of four new residence halls.

Dabney House, as part of the complex that makes up the four south houses, was constructed in 1930 and 1931. It was known as the house of gentlemen and the house of captains, but underwent a dramatic change in personality during the 1960s. In 1973, the house was disowned by the Dabney family when students from Dabney House protested then-President Nixon's role in the Watergate affair with a sign on the library bearing the phrase "Impeach Nixon."

thumb|175px|right|The "minimalist coat-of-arms" of Dabney House, designed by old Darb Kaihsu Tai in the late 1990s, based on the Dabney family coat-of-arms.

Traditionally standing for "Dabney Eats It," referring to a particularly unpalatable plate of noodles in the 1950s, the trigraph DEI has come to be a badge of pride for Darbs. Besides naming the house's recreation room after it and spreading it all across campus, Dabney alumni have made DEI a hidden code in the outside world. The letters can be seen in movies (most notably Real Genius) and video games (including GTA: Vice City and several Intellivision games). There are even stories of the trigraph making its way into space on JPL probes including the Voyager space craft, and being written on the Moon by astronaut Darb Harrison Schmitt. In the late 1960s, during on-campus shooting of an episode of the TV series Mission: Impossible, students stenciled the letters "DEI" high on a wall in a tunnel scheduled to be filmed the next day. The marking was subsequently visible on national television behind Peter Lupus as he paused in one shot.

More recently, Dabney started the Student Coffee House, or "Chouse", and provided the majority of the staff for a couple years. Since then, Coffee House has become a part of Caltech's Dining Services and is now managed by CDS. Dabney hosts the annual Millikan Pumpkin Drop Experiment (a parody of the Millikan oil-drop experiment) where pumpkins frozen in liquid nitrogen are dropped from Millikan library. This tradition was featured on the TV show Numb3rs. Dabney also hosts Drop Day, a party held the Saturday after the second term drop day to celebrate the point of no return, and Dabney Metal Night, an opportunity for the amateur bands of Caltech to play for the crowd.

While the traditional motto of Dabney House (Fidelis et gratus "Faithfulness and thankfulness") still stands on the Dabney crest, Dabney House has instituted a new, changeable motto. In line with Caltech's tradition of wall murals and wall writings, any member may change the house motto by striking the previous motto on a designated motto wall and writing a new one.

Notable Darbs

Harrison Schmitt (1957, Geology) – Geologist, Astronaut, Adjunct Professor of Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Politician
John Clauser (1964, Physics) – Physicist, Nobel Laureate in Physics
Barbara Turpin (1984, Engineering and Applied Science) - Chemist, Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Antonio Rangel (1993, Economics) – Bing Professor of Neuroscience, Behavioral Biology, and Economics at Caltech
Brandi Cossairt (2006, Chemistry) – Lloyd E. and Florence M. West Endowed Professor of Chemistry at the University of Washington

Fleming House

thumb|300px|Fleming courtyard in 2008

Fleming House was built with funds donated by a number of people, and the name Fleming was chosen to honor Arthur H. Fleming, then the chairman of Caltech's Board of Trustees.

Members of Fleming House are called Flems. The house color is red. The motto, from the crest as commonly seen on house beer steins, is "Let the Deed Shaw." The house battle cry is "Go Big Red!" Another important maxim is "Flems stick together!", as well as the slogan "Where men are men, giants walk the earth, and the thundering herd is real" and "Page Sux". Historically, Fleming House did not offer social memberships (nominally citing all non-Fleming undergraduates as "social members"), but a recent decision by the house leadership changed this policy. Students may now apply for and obtain Fleming House social membership.

The physical layout of Fleming House includes rooms numbered 8.5 (formerly the RA apartment, now a triple),π, and "Alley 6.9". The Interhouse Trophy, awarded to the winner of the interhouse athletic competitions, has been awarded to Fleming for the past five years.

For the past few years, Fleming and Page House have pranked each other regularly and included each other in initiations.

Fleming cannon

thumb|left|The Fleming cannon in June 2007

The Fleming cannon, a Caltech landmark, rests on its wheels on the Olive Walk in front of Fleming. As it makes a very loud noise when fired, it is only fired to mark important events, such as the end of Rotation, Ditch Day, the end of the term, and graduation. It was originally cast for use in the Franco-Prussian War but eventually found its way to the then-military themed Southwestern Academy in San Marino, California, where it remained on the front lawn between 1925 and 1972.

In 1972 Fleming class officers got permission from Southwestern Academy to take the cannon, but the underclassmen who mounted new wheels on it and dragged it to campus at night thought they were stealing it. It took months of paint stripping and other work to restore it to operational status. The Caltech administration ordered its return in 1975, but negotiations began for an official transfer of the cannon back to Caltech in 1980, and in 1981 it was returned on a permanent basis to the Caltech campus.

The cannon was stolen by Harvey Mudd students in 1986. At the demands of both college administrations, the cannon was returned to Fleming House approximately eight weeks after the prank.

It was rumored that Harvey Mudd would attempt to steal the cannon again in 2006 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their original theft; however, the cannon disappeared on March 28, a day before the anniversary, only to show up at MIT just in time for Campus Preview Weekend, during which many rising freshmen visit MIT. A (seemingly fake) moving company by the name of Howe & Ser Moving Co. has taken credit. (The name is a double pun: When substituting "and" for the ampersand, it reads "how we answer", while substituting the Latin et for the ampersand gives "Howitzer".) Displayed prominently in front of MIT's Green Building, the Fleming cannon sported a giant, gold-plated MIT class ring around its barrel.

A day after the prank was disclosed, Fleming's members began planning a recovery operation on the night of April 7. They immediately sent twenty-three members to Boston to retrieve their cannon. The Flems were greeted at MIT by a group of students and police who watched as the cannon was loaded into a truck. Afterward, a friendly barbecue celebrated the event.

Notable Flems

George O. Abell (1951, Astronomy) – Astronomer, Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles
Ronald H. Willens (1953, Physics) – researcher at Bell Labs, entrepreneur
Benjamin M. Rosen (1954, Electrical Engineering) – venture capitalist, founder of Sevin Rosen Funds, former chair of Compaq
William Robert Graham (1959, Physics) – deputy administrator and acting administrator of NASA, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Leland H. Hartwell (1961, Biology) - recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Jay Obernolte (1992, Engineering and Applied Science) – Video game developer and politician
Jeffery M. Mendez (1999, Chemistry) – Caltech Lecturer in Chemistry
Ryan Patterson (2000, Physics) – Caltech Professor of Physics

Ricketts House

thumb|300px|Ricketts courtyard in 2008

Ricketts House was funded by and named for mining engineer L. D. Ricketts. Members of Ricketts House are called Scurves (or Skurves) due to a play on the similarity of the name Ricketts to the disease rickets and the fact that scurvy is another vitamin deficiency disease. Members of Ricketts House were known as Rowdies until about 1960; alumni of that period still draw the distinction between Rowdies and Scurves.

Ricketts traditions include fire-related activities and the brakedrum. Prior to early 2003, the Ricketts courtyard housed a large concrete pot, in which massive fires were often enjoyed during cool Pasadena evenings. The courtyard originally featured a large Italian marble well head (historically attributed to and named "Millikan's Pot"). It was used as a measure for height of serves in the singles and doubles games of four square played in the courtyard. By the mid-1970s, it existed only as chunks of rubble, after destruction in an experiment in more exciting pot fires allegedly involving newspaper, xylene, and matches. Around that time, enterprising house officers arranged for its replacement with a large section of concrete sewer pipe, which was eventually replaced with a concrete facsimile of the original pot. Due to tightening of Pasadena fire codes and the Caltech administration's liability concerns, the pot was removed. A portable fireplace temporarily replaced the pot. The brakedrum is a contest between the freshman class and the sophomore class over ownership of the brakedrum.

Ricketts House was known for athletics and student government in the 1950s, but soon after that they became known less for these activities and more for activities that pushed the motto "Take me as I am" to the limit. Recently, Ricketts had an inverted pentagram on the front wall of its dining room. Administration members called for its removal as it was a symbol that may have offended the general public who viewed the house during tours. The pentagram was originally painted in the dining hall for the Interhouse party of 1989 – prior to this time this symbol had no particular connection to Ricketts House. In later years the inverted pentagram was added to the Ricketts House crest (the original had had ship's wheels instead of pentagrams). During the renovations from 2004 to 2006, the mural was painted over, and a new mural policy was put in place. Conflicts regarding the new mural policy continued until the early 2010s, when the policy was relaxed. The house features a number of murals, including one featuring the cover art of the Grateful Dead's eponymous album that was painted in the 1970s. Today the house hosts a number of social events throughout the year, including a termly open mic night, featuring music performances by students, a termly formal dinner, and an interhouse party known as Apache.

The building has space for approximately 70 students, while the house had a total membership of about 110 at commencement in 2019. Two graduate student resident associates live in apartments in the house.

Ricketts remains the only house not to offer social membership. A referendum to add social membership in 2018 was defeated by vote of 16 in favour, 43 against, and 3 abstentions.

Notable Scurves and Rowdies

Leo James Rainwater (1939, Physics) – physicist, Nobel laureate, Pupin Professor of Physics at Columbia University
Vernon L. Smith (1949, Electrical Engineering) – economist, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, professor at the University of Arizona, George Mason University, and Chapman University
Carl V. Larson (1952, Mechanical Engineering) – former vice-president of Versatec, an electrostatic printing company acquired by Xerox
Alexander J. Dessler (1952, Physics) – astronomer, professor emeritus and inaugural Chair, Department of Space Science at Rice University, Director of the Space Science Laboratory at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
Anthony Leonard (1959) – Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics, Emeritus, at Caltech
Bradley Efron (1960, Mathematics) – pre-eminent mathematical statistician, MacArthur award, Presidential Medal of Science
Cleve Moler (1961, Mathematics) – inventor of Matlab
Robert McEliece (1964) – Allen E. Puckett Professor and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech
Michael Baskes (1965) – distinguished research professor, University of North Texas, member of the National Academy of Engineering
Seth Putterman (1966) – Professor of Physics and Astronomy t the University of California, Los Angeles
B. Thomas Soifer (1968) – Harold Brown Professor of Physics, Emeritus at Caltech; Director, Spitzer Science Center
Edward Groth (1968) – professor, Princeton University
Christopher Dede (1969, Chemistry) – educational researcher, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Howard Zebker (1976, Engineering and Applied Science) – Kwoh Ting Li Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Geophysics, Stanford University
Christopher S. Bretherton (1980) – professor, University of Washington, member of the National Academy of Sciences
Cecilia Rodriguez (Aragon) (1981) – Programmer, pilot, professor, poet; what's next?
John Stembridge (1981) – Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan
Mark Jeffrey Rosker (1981) – physicist at DARPA and named IEEE Fellow
Minami Yoda (1983) – mechanical engineer, Red Cedar Distinguished Professor and Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State University and former chair of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, American Physical Society
David Nice (1987) – Charles A. Dana Professor of Physics, Lafayette College
Jeff Greason (1988) – co-founder and the Chief Technologist of Electric Sky, member of the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee
Paul W. K. Rothemund (1994) – MacArthur Fellow, Research Professor of Bioengineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences, and Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech
Edray Herber Goins (1994, Mathematics, Physics) – Mathematician specializing in number theory and algebraic geometry, professor at Purdue University and later Pomona College
C. Kevin Boyce (1995, Biology, Literature) – MacArthur Fellow, paleobotanist, professor at Stanford University
Pankaj Mehta (1997, Mathematics) – Sloan Fellow and Simons Investigator, Professor of Physics, Boston University
Sham Kakade (1998, Physics) – computer scientist, Gordon McKay Professor in Computer Science at Harvard University formerly known as Ruddock House, was constructed in 1960 in honor of Albert Billings Ruddock, then the Chairman of the Caltech Board of Trustees. It was renamed in 2021 in honor of Grant Venerable ('32), the first black undergraduate student at Caltech, due to Ruddock's involvement with the Human Betterment Foundation, a eugenics organization.

Approximately 160 Caltech undergraduates are members of the house and approximately 80 reside in the house. Members of the house are known as "Vens" and were formerly nicknamed "Rudds." During the week, student waiters serve family-style dinners in the dining room; some notable dinner traditions include the throwing of bread rolls and "floating" members who break dinner rules by pouring water on them. The hallways, referred to as "alleys" by undergraduates, are adorned with various murals including reproductions of M.C. Escher works, a Monopoly Board, Simpsons characters, and a two-story mural of an astronaut. This mural, called "The Spaceman," is based on a photograph of astronaut Ed White's spacewalk during Gemini 4. The painting was made completely by Phil Cormier ('79) in a day's worth of work. A few years later Rusty Schweickart Jr. (whose father walked in space on Apollo 9) was elected house president. Another Ven connected to the space program is Philip Engelauf ('78), who later became a flight director at Johnson Space Center.

Other Vens include Bill Gross of idealab!, MIT's Peter Shor (1981) – applied mathematician best known for Shor's algorithm in quantum computation, MacArthur Fellow Jim Fruchterman, applied physicist Kerry Vahala, president of several major research universities Eric Kaler, astronomer Tod R. Lauer, computer scientist John Gustafson, energy storage scientist Michael Aziz, click chemist (and possible Nobel candidate) M. G. Finn, and Nobel Prize recipients Eric Betzig (Chemistry 2014) and Michael Rosbash (Physiology/Medicine 2017).

OPI

After the end of a campus-wide undergraduate party tradition, Interhouse, Venerable began the tradition of OPI. OPI, standing for either "Our Private Interhouse" or "(Our) Own Private Interhouse," traditionally occurs during the winter term of the academic year. One of the most notable aspects of the OPI is the amount of time and effort put into construction and artwork for the sets of the party. The past decade's preparations have included a Mayan temple, the Roman Colosseum, skylines of Tokyo, a giant Egyptian pyramid, a 16-foot tall windmill and 20-foot tall elephant statue from Moulin Rouge, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and a Gothic cathedral with 32-foot tall facades.

Avery House

thumb|300px|Avery in 2010

Avery House is part of the housing system at Caltech, participating in Rotation and housing undergraduates, yearlong exchange students, faculty, and visiting guests. Avery's members are called "Averites".

Founded in 1991, Avery had previously only housed upperclass students, graduate students, and faculty, but by a 10-to-1 vote in May 2004, the Faculty Board approved the decision to make Avery open to incoming freshmen on a two-year experimental basis. Since the 2005–2006 school year, Avery has been part of the Rotation process and houses incoming freshman.

Some recent traditions include Assery (short for Avery Assassins, game of Assassins using water guns), an Iron Chef competition, and a Faculty Dessert Night with an open talent show. Avery House participates in interhouse sports, holds an annual interhouse party, and organizes annual ski trips, beach trips, and BBQs. In line with its historical position as an alternative option to the house system, Avery embraces an accepting mindset whereby anyone who wants to become an Avery member only needs to attain ten signatures from Avery members who are living in the house or have lived there previously.

Avery enjoys an environment of faculty families. The Faculty in Residence (FiRs) are chosen by the students in an interview and discussion process and the faculty are provided budget to hold social events for the undergraduates of the house. Events held by faculty include Super Bowl parties and casual dinners.

In both physical size and bedspaces, Avery House is noticeably larger than the other houses, housing almost twice as many undergraduates as other houses. Avery House has several facilities, including a dining hall with a large kitchen, a conference room, a piano room (Gary Lorden Recreation Room), a library, a garden, and a basement garage. The dining hall, library, and conference room are available to the Caltech community for official events after approval by the Avery ExComm or reservation via the Housing website. Avery also holds a number of "off-campus" spots, which are physically in the house but can be chosen by any undergraduate participating in the off-campus lottery. Finally, owing to a policy said to have been put in place by R. Stanton Avery himself , Avery members are not allowed to place anything "nonremovable" on the walls, though the true origins of this policy are unclear. As a result, murals are painted on canvas and hung up on bulletin boards, instead of painted on the walls directly.

Bechtel Residence

The Bechtel Residence started construction in late 2016, and began housing undergraduates in Fall 2018. It is by far the largest housing option on campus, at over 200 beds. However, it is not a House, lacking the self-determining political systems, defined membership, and collection of dues like those of the existing 8 houses. Bechtel additionally has apartments for various live-in staff and faculty, specifically a professional staff member called a residential life coordinator, six graduate students employed as Residential Associates (RAs), and two faculty-in-residence.

Other "off-campus" housing

Caltech-owned housing that is not part of any of the eight houses is known as "off-campus" housing, even if it is actually physically located on the Caltech campus (non-Caltech owned housing is called "off-off-campus" or "off-squared"). These housing units do not maintain memberships or have the community or traditions that the other houses have. Off-campus housing besides Bechtel currently consists of Marks House and Braun House. Freshmen will not rotate into these. Historically, before the advent of Bechtel, they included Del Mar apartments, Chester apartments, and a number of "Off-Campus Alleys" (OCAs) nicknamed e.g. Batcave, Fort Knight, Hazard, Munth, ROCAs, and Watchtower. These other resources have now been re-allocated towards graduate student housing.

Until the mid-1980s there were literally off-campus houses for undergraduates at 317 and 360 South Holliston Avenue associated informally and formally, respectively, with Dabney House, the distinction being that rooms in 360 were considered part of the house's yearly, seniority-inflected, room allocation scheme.

Notes

References

External links

The Interhouse Committee (IHC) – committee of the presidents of the houses; plans and supervises Rotation, inter-house sports and activities, and works closely with Housing and some Faculty Board committees as the representative of the undergraduate body
Welcome to Undergraduate Housing at Caltech – from Caltech's housing department
A History of Undergraduate Self-Governance at Caltech; Part II, A History of the Undergraduate Houses (1930-2002)
Task force on Undergraduate Residence Life Initiatives (TURLI) report
Eco-Rotation, an Experiment to be Implemented This Fall – Caltech is updating the Rotation process for the 2010 entering freshman class. Houses that fail to attract sufficient rankings from incoming students will shrink and eventually disband.