Ryan ChartrandIn recent years, large freshmen classes have given incoming students the option of living in “triple” or “quad” rooms at a discounted rate. This year, the number of incoming students resulted in a random lottery, which determined which incoming freshmen will live in the tripled residence hall rooms.
In a June 20 e-mail sent to incoming freshmen, Preston Allen, the executive director of Housing and Residential Life, wrote: “Acceptance to the University for this coming academic year is at an all-time high, as is the demand for on-campus housing. For ‘Regular Fall Admitted’ freshmen, we were only able to keep the housing application system open for two days and the amount of students who did secure housing during this short time quickly exceeded our design capacity.”
As a result, the e-mail stated that a “random lottery process” will be implemented to determine the living situations of the remaining students. According to Cal Poly’s housing Web site, students living in these converted rooms will save $747 on rent annually.
Evan Razor, a city and regional planning sophomore, lived in a triple room in the North Mountain dorms last year.
“There were three of us in a room, and honestly, it wasn’t bad at all,” Razor said.
“It was a tighter space, which made it a little more difficult, and we didn’t have a TV, so I guess you could consider those to be cons. There’s just less privacy in general, but rent was cheaper and, I mean, it worked. We didn’t really have any problem at all.”
Despite the downsides to the situation, Razor said that the good outweighed the bad, and he wouldn’t change anything if he could.
“I definitely thought it was worth the cheaper rent,” he said. “It wasn’t a big deal at all. We all got along, so maybe we were lucky. I would definitely do it again; it’s not that big of a complication. We were in North Mountain so our rooms were a little bigger, but I don’t think that it would be much of a problem in the red bricks either.”
Allen says that new living arrangements will maximize the number of incoming students who can utilize the benefits provided by on-campus life.
“We have been asked by the university to provide as many first-year students as we can the opportunity to benefit from the whole campus experience,” Allen said in an e-mail interview. “With so many of our first-time students living on and off campus, a special focus of mine will be to work with the campus, as well as the off-campus community, to do more than house our students, but to work with us to integrate them fully into the campus life so they can experience the full sense of connection.”
New furniture has been purchased to accommodate the triple rooms in the red brick dorms. To efficiently utilize the limited space, the rooms will contain a loft bed with two desks underneath. In addition, there will also be a bunk bed, a wardrobe and a third desk.
According to the housing Web site, selected double rooms in North Mountain and South Mountain Halls have been reconfigured for three residents, and rooms have been converted on the first floor of each tower in Yosemite for four residents.
The Web site also says that students who would rather opt out of the triple or quad rooms will be placed on a waiting list, and moved into a double room as spaces become available.