Most students laugh when they hear about males and females living on the same floor at Marquette, but this year it is no joke. Mashuda Hall’s third floor guest wing is now home to both female and male students, making it the only coed floor in a Marquette residence hall.

“Midsummer it became apparent that there were many more transfer students than expected,” said James McMahon, the dean of Residence Life.

He said Residence Life considered several options to remedy the overcrowding. In addition to creating the coed floor in Mashuda, O’Donnell Hall’s lounge rooms were converted to living spaces.

“Mashuda was the best place to place women because of the gender breakdown,” McMahon said. “Also, there is pretty good separation between the two sides.”

Rooms in Mashuda all have their own bathrooms, and curfew for the opposite sex still works the same way, ending at 1 a.m. on weekdays and 2 a.m. on weekends.

Marquette does not regularly feature coed living arrangements, but this is not the first time male and female students have occupied the same space in a university residence hall.

The same wing in Mashuda was used for coed living 18 years ago, McMahon said in an e-mail. Six years ago, the first floor of O’Donnell was coed. Marquette did not consider permanently adopting the living arrangement in either case, he said.

There are no plans to convert O’Donnell or Cobeen to coed residence halls, he said.

“We talked about it three or four years ago, and the guys in O’Donnell threw a fit,” McMahon said.

As for the students currently occupying Mashuda’s coed floor, most have no problem with the arrangement.

“I have not really seen any major differences,” said Claire Joyce, a sophomore in the College of Business Administration. “It is pretty much the same as living on an all-girl floor.”

According to Joyce, if they did not have separate bathrooms, it would be much different.

“It would be a little weird to be walking around in your towel with guys around,” Joyce said.

Jack Turek, a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences, said there have been no problems with the coed floor.

“Honestly, I have been to the girl’s side once, and it was to help some friends move in,” Turek said.

Kelsey Tyrrell, a sophomore in the College of Business Administration, lived in an all-girls dorm last year at St. Norbert College in Green Bay, Wis., and does not see the difference.

“There are not a lot of boys running around and it is not very loud, so there is not a huge problem,” Tyrrell said.

Despite being forced into a rarely used living arrangement, the university has sufficient housing for the current size of incoming freshman classes, said Rick Arcuri, associate dean for administration of Residence Life.

“In the future, we are always looking to work on building [residence halls], but we are kind of landlocked,” Arcuri said.

Currently, there is no definite plan for a new residence hall, but the university has been exploring a number of options, McMahon said.

According to McMahon, when looking at building a new residence hall, the university must consider if it will be needed 15 to 20 years from now.

“Developers are always interested in building off-campus housing, but we have plenty to accommodate students,” he said. “We would have to sit down to see what developers would be interested and get together with the appropriate university offices to talk.”