More than 130 freshmen were unable to select housing on Monday for the next academic year, according to university officials. These 139 students will select housing on April 7 at 10 a.m. with their original selection numbers, but Residential Life said not all of these students will end up with housing on this date.
Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Cindy Long Porter said, in an email to current freshmen who don’t have room assignments for next year, that they will be able to select housing in eight apartments in Crescent on York Hill and two apartments in Sahlin Hall on Mount Carmel. Some sophomores lived on York Hill during the 2013-2014 academic year.
“We will continue working with students over the course of the semester as additional spaces become available,” Porter said in an email.
Freshman Savannah Ochoa is one of the students who could not choose housing for next year. She said she does not want to live on the York Hill campus as a sophomore.
“I don’t even have a license,” she said. “I’m going to have to get all that figured out if I’m going to be living on York because I know that the shuttle system is sometimes not reliable. It’s not something I was planning on going through and it’s not fair.”
Ochoa said she and her friends considered living off campus, but they would rather live on campus.
“We even came to the point where we were looking for off campus housing that had nothing to do with Quinnipiac, just to rent our own place,” she said. “But even that’s ridiculous. We shouldn’t have to do that.”
Freshman Brittany Chan also did not pick housing on Monday and has toyed with the idea of living off campus.
“I also start clinicals next year, so I’m going to be driving around anyways and it is a lot cheaper that way too,” she said. “But I really don’t know what’s going to happen if I don’t get any of those eight rooms [in Crescent].”
A limited number of single spaces also remain available on the Mount Carmel campus in suites or apartments with Residential Assistants (RAs). Porter said if anyone is interested in being in one of these spaces to email Associate Director of Residential Life Melissa Karipidis.
If students do not want to live with an RA and do not have a housing assignment after the process ends on April 7, Porter said to call the Mount Carmel Residential Life office at 203-582-8666 to schedule an appointment beginning April 11. The appointments will be to discuss where students will be housed and possibly be able to choose at least one roommate or suitemate, as spaces become available.
Chan said she thinks the housing process is fair, but she is not sure why the university did not anticipate this problem.
“I just don’t think they thought it out enough that they would have so many extra students and now they’re stressing out about that,” she said. “I feel like they could have had a better solution beforehand before they had this whole system start.”
Ochoa is disappointed with how the university is handling the increased student population.
“I know that the school wants to accept more kids, but it just seems like they’re being greedy with the money,” she said. “It doesn’t seem fair to the students that have already been admitted into this place and who have been living here for a year, to just be like ‘hey, we don’t have a room for you anymore, go up to York.’”
Ochoa said the issue she has experienced with the housing situation has made her question whether or not she would pick Quinnipiac if she had to go back and do it again.
“I feel that I wouldn’t consider transferring because I’ve gotten so established here,” she said. “But if I was a student who was accepted here as being a senior in high school again, and I knew about this housing situation, I probably wouldn’t have picked it. I wouldn’t have picked Quinnipiac.”
