Frustrations ran high among the freshman class at this year's housing lottery when 77 students were waitlisted for housing.
In accordance with University policy, accommodation for freshmen and sophomores is guaranteed, however, many students who had been waiting in line for an extended time were sent home with no confirmed room.
Yolanda King, Director of Residential Life and Learning, acknowledged this discrepancy between the number of male and female students placed on the waiting list.
"This year we had more males on the sophomore waitlist due to how we had configured some of the available spaces," King said.
According to King, the "majority" of the waitlisted were male.
A comprehensive list of students on the waiting list could not be obtained at press time because the ORLL is still attempting to get in touch with students who did not attend the lottery.
Nevertheless, King remarked that she is "comfortable" with the number of students placed on the waiting list.
"Housing for rising sophomores went quite well as we worked to house this class in one day during general lottery," King said.
The ORLL designates randomly selected lottery numbers between 1500 and 2999 to rising sophomores. Students given numbers toward the high-end of the range have the opportunity to pick rooms first.
Freshman Marc Bouffard waited with his prospective roommate through a backlog of housing requests, armed with a 1900-range lottery number and hopes of a room in either South or Bush Halls.
As the evening progressed and the male rooms on the projection screen were blacked out one after another, Bouffard said he would take whatever he could get.
The last male sophomore room went to a student with a mid-range 2100 lottery number. The ORLL opened more rooms for males but a significant number of freshman men still did not get a room for next year.
Affected students are less than pleased.
"The lottery was very stressful and just annoying, I was there for two and a half hours and then I got waitlisted," freshman Alejandro Pi?±ero said. "It's just such a big pain to do something that shouldn't be such a big hassle." Pi?±ero's lottery number of 2048 put him among the first ten on the waiting list.
"The part that really bothers me [is] that we're paying over $40,000, and they say we're guaranteed a room, but I'm on the waitlist," Bouffard said.
According to Bouffard, the ORLL also did not confirm whether he and his prospective roommate could live together, nor did it provide reassuring communication about future housing alternatives.
While freshman Jeff Rothbard was lucky enough to pick one of the last rooms for rising sophomore males, he said he sympathized with those who were not fortunate enough to pick their rooms.
"It's nice to be able to know where you're going to live so you can start planning for what you're going to get for the room," said Bouffard.
According to King, students were contacted via e-mail at the beginning of Spring Break and informed that they would receive housing assignments once they returned back to campus.
"We plan to finish housing sophomores at the end of this week and the beginning of next week," King said.
Despite King's assurances, Pi?±ero said he is still embittered by the housing lottery process as a whole, and questioned whether the existing lottery process is the best method of selecting housing.
"[The housing process] was very stressful and just annoying, right in the middle of midterms, which [doesn't] help you at all," he said.
While King did not find the number of males on the waiting list to be problematic, she said that the timing of the lottery may have been an inconvenience for many students.
"We were not able to make any last-minute changes, as we had set the date and location months in advance," King said. She said that the ORLL would make "every effort to avoid this problem next year."
