This fall, students are feeling the consequences of last spring's housing crunch.
Due to the imbalance of juniors studying abroad in spring 2010, housing lottery options for the fall were fewer and tighter. The conversion of Stowe Hall and Stowe Inn quads to quints, and of 25 Brunswick apartment doubles to forced triples, pushed many students into housing they would not otherwise have considered.
Despite initial disappointment and jumping through countless hoops, most have embraced the tight living quarters with optimism.
"It really isn't that bad," said Shoshanna Cohn '11, who lives in a one-bedroom triple in Brunswick apartments. She had originally intended to enter the doubles lottery, but Cohn believed she would have a better chance of getting a forced triple.
"We're girls so we have a lot of stuff and it's just a matter of being able to compartmentalize everything into smaller storage or figure out what you really need," said Cohn.
"I don't know where else ResLife would have put us," she added. "The lottery makes everything sound a lot worse than it is...it was a good decision on [ResLife's] part."
Connor Gallagher '10, who lives in a three-person bedroom in a Stowe Inn quint, is enjoying his housing more than he had anticipated.
"We're all really happy with the situation. There's more living space than we expected," he said. "The fact that it used to be a quad it pretty ridiculous because the amount of space we have in the triple is still big and there's a lot of floor space."
Gallagher originally applied to live in Ladd house in a block of four. Then, after getting a poor number in the quads lottery, Gallagher and his blockmates picked up another student and tried for a quint.
"We wanted to live in Stowe Hall because it's more centrally located, but that got taken right before...we're lucky how unaware people are of how nice Stowe Inn is," he said of the housing lottery.
"It was either this or a Chambo double, which has no kitchen, no common area, no bathroom...this is definitely better," Gallagher said.
Faced with living in Chamberlain Hall, others preferred to move off campus.
"At the end of the Housing Lottery there were four students who opted to be placed on the Deferred Housing List," wrote Associate Director of Housing Operations Lisa Rendall in an e-mail to the Orient. Both groups of two chose to live off campus.
Juniors Eric D'Elia and Michael Power, who got the last pick in the doubles lottery, did so almost immediately after finding a house on Dunning Street in Brunswick.
"I had been looking off campus before the lottery because I knew the housing situation was really bad," he said.
He and Power hit every obstacle in the lottery system. First they entered the quads lottery with two rising sophomores, then they blocked with four other students to try for two triples and eventually they deferred housing in the doubles lottery.
"I didn't want to live in Chamberlain or in a freshman dorm as a junior," said D'Elia, referring to the doubles on the fifth floor of Osher Hall.
"I'm pretty happy with my situation. It turned out fine in the end, but I would have liked to have more options on campus," D'Elia said.
He offered a suggestion to Residential Life for future housing crunches.
"I think that people who aren't going abroad should have an advantage in the housing system over people who are going abroad because they have to live there the whole year," he said.
Too late for some, Residential Life expanded housing options over the summer.
"Based on enrollment and study away numbers, the College made a decision in early June to lease three apartments on Elm Street owned by Maine State Music Theatre. Over the summer, I reached out to groups living in Chamberlain doubles to see if they had any interest in living at Elm Street," wrote Rendall.
"Experience in assigning these apartments in past years has shown us that friends living together at Elm Street work better than randomly assigned students. Residents of Elm Street generally want a friend to walk with back and forth to campus. We had quite a bit of interest in this option and selected students based on their Doubles Lottery number."
Additionally, Rendall said that several students did not show up to the housing lottery for various reasons but were assigned housing over the summer.