UChicagoHousing System

Problem

UChicago's residential house system is one of its most distinctive features and not the easiest to explain. Unlike a typical college dorm setup, the houses are intentional communities with live-in faculty heads, trained resident assistants, and a support structure designed around the whole student, not just their academics. For prospective students and parents trying to evaluate what life actually looks like on campus, the information existed in handbooks, web pages, and orientation materials. But nothing made it feel real or worth getting excited about. The housing system needed a better first impression.

Decision

The whiteboard animation format was a natural fit: warm, conversational, and well-suited to walking an audience through a system with several moving parts without making it feel like a policy document. The script was structured to answer the questions a nervous student or parent ask: who lives in the houses, who looks after you, what happens when things get hard? All while keeping the overall tone light enough to convey that residential life at UChicago is genuinely something to look forward to. Resident heads, resident assistants, and the broader house community each got their moment, framed not as institutional resources but as real people invested in student life.

Outcome

The video became a popular piece for the admissions office, used during campus visits and sent to prospective students exploring what it means to actually live at UChicago. Housing is one of those topics where students and parents arrive with real anxiety, and having something visual, friendly, and specific to point them to made a measurable difference. It's the kind of video that doesn't need to oversell anything; the house system is genuinely good, and the video's job was simply to make that legible.