The beautiful view of Sleeping Giant, raked leaves in autumn and the brick pathways to walk home to a nice warm dorm room are soon to be replaced for this year’s juniors at Quinnipiac.
As many students are already aware, Quinnipiac University does not provide housing for seniors on campus.
Instead of those lovely images, Quinnipiac’s soon-to-be seniors will experience shoveling their car out of the snow, fighting for parking spots at 8:00 a.m., and actually paying cash for that $5 cheeseburger in the cafeteria.
Due to the increasing numbers of incoming students, and Quinnipiac’s inability to provide housing, the university decided several years ago to have seniors pack their bags and move off-campus.
Fortunately, Quinnipiac tries to soften this blow to juniors by providing support through Residential Life.
Not many students take advantage of this assistance, though, and instead venture out to search for an apartment on their own.
“I hate it. I wish we could live on campus the whole time,” Meagan MacMenamie, junior physical therapy major said.
Those who are aware of the help that Quinnipiac will provide offer advice to those on the quest to find housing.
“Do not depend on Quinnipiac. Go out and find something yourself. Read the [local] newspapers because that is where my roommates and I found a lot of numbers,” Dan Kubat, senior biology major, said.
“I think it is really unfortunate that they do not give seniors any options,” Susan Schnakenberg, junior physical therapy major, said.
“It is one thing to move them off campus, but to not even have off-campus housing available really makes it look like housing is not a priority.”
“If seniors have to be off campus, then maybe [Quinnipiac should] have houses off campus that we are placed into rather than going out by ourselves to look,” MacMenamie said.
In actuality, Quinnipiac does offer limited housing off campus.
“Many of these properties are located within a mile of campus. The university also owns one complex that is approximately 15 minutes from campus,” according to the Residential Life website.
However, students are not placed into these houses; they must fill out a rental properties form that can be found either on the Residential Life website or in the Residential Life office.
The next question that most juniors are asking is: “When should I start looking for an apartment?”
“Last year we looked a little before Christmas [break], but we waited to view places until after Christmas [break],” Katie Gallagher, senior sociology major, said.
“We did not start looking until the beginning of spring semester,” Kubat said.
However, both Schnakenberg and MacMenamie have not started looking for off-campus housing at this time.
“I will start looking soon. I definitely want to have it done before Christmas break,” MacMenamie said.
What is important to these future independent off-campus residents?
Number of bedrooms seems to be the most important, followed by the closeness to campus.
When looking for an apartment last year, “we were looking for five rooms, so we ended up with a two story apartment building,” Gallagher said.
Retrospectively, Gallagher would have made a few changes: “Do not live with a landlord downstairs and try to have utilities included.”
This year, Avalon Walk has closed its doors to undergraduate students, which causes the search for housing to become more difficult in many juniors’ opinions.
“My roommates were all planning to live there next year,” MacMenamie said.
Some future seniors have ideas as to how Quinnipiac can fix this housing problem.
“Build more dorms,” MacMenamie said.
Until Quinnipiac is able build more places for students to reside, the future of Quinnipiac’s seniors’ on-campus dwelling looks fairly grim, and this year’s juniors do not seem to be too happy about it.
