Hours before housing signup, students learned triples will no longer be available in Schroeder Hall for the upcoming year.
The announcement was made in an email from The Office of Residence at 8 a.m. Monday. Housing signup went from 4-9 p.m. that night. The eight-hour notice left many scrambling for new plans.
“The sudden change completely threw me off during a time of already high stress,” Aileen Stanton, a freshman in the College of Communication, said. “I couldn’t even focus during class knowing that everything I had planned out had flipped.”
The email stated that the space the triples occupy is going to be used “in anticipation of converting those spaces into study lounges for the residents.”
“These (triple) rooms were initially designed as study lounges,” Mary Janz, Executive Director of Housing and Residence Life, said. “With returning the rooms to study lounges, we will de-densify the building adding to a greater sense of community.”
In response to that part of the email, Mikala Hershman, a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences, said, “It was confusing because there are already common rooms.”
Both the initial email and Janz emphasized there are triples available in Mashuda Hall as well as quad rooms in Humphrey Hall. However, some feared that with the triples in Schroeder being out of the equation, the demand for those rooms in other halls will increase and be more difficult to get.
“The last-minute notice was really inconvenient and caused a lot of stress for people who thought they had it figured out and now have to decide on new arrangements the day of,” Hershman said. “My brother and his friends were planning on a triple and now they are trying to do a quad in Humphrey, but they have to find another person.”
People who had early sign-up times were confident they would be able to get one of the few coveted Schroeder triples were left scrambling.
Jack Lawder, a freshman in the College of Communication, was one of those people. “It’s not an easy situation to deal with when there are three people that want a triple and all of a sudden it is two people in a double and one person left clueless,” he said.
Janz said the Office of Residence Life has been “working with a number of offices across campus to make this happen … the decision was not finalized until late last week.”
However, the decision to wait until the day of housing sign-up to announce the change was something Lawder said he was not pleased with.
“I believe the lack of communication between the Office of Residence Life and students is unprofessional,” Lawder said. “I went to a meeting a couple weeks back regarding housing expecting to be informed in full, but clearly that didn’t happen.”
