This year, about 80 students got lucky with Tufts housing: they have two closets, two beds, and the space of a double all to themselves.
Currently, there are eighty-one empty beds scattered throughout campus, all in what are called "single doubles," a double room with only one person living in it.
There are always some empty beds "due to attrition," Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman said. Students take a leave of absence to study elsewhere, transfer to another school, or withdraw for various personal reasons with late notification.
Yet students seeking to move into these available beds as replacements for less desirable living situations may find themselves less than welcome.
The residents who have acquired a single in a living space that is supposed to accommodate two people "have the tendency to make themselves comfortable," Reitman said.
"You and I know that they probably don't get the warmest reception when they go look at the rooms," said Reitman. "Would you really want a stranger moving in on your bed-turned-couch living room entertainment area? Think about it."
After her roommate transferred to Barnard College this summer, sophomore Hyejo Jun was left with a single double in Miller Hall and has become accustomed to it. "I would like to keep my single," she said "I'm situated comfortably right now."
Despite the lucky students' reluctance to share, the Office of Residential Life and Learning (ORLL) has been working on filling up the empty rooming slots.
Though the 81 empty beds may remain unoccupied for the duration of the semester, students returning or transferring to Tufts for the next semester will require housing beginning in January, Reitman said.
In preparation, students in single doubles "should choose who they want to live with for the second half of the year or sooner," Reitman said. "Otherwise, [students] coming back will be assigned rooms automatically and there will be no interviewing process."
"I received a letter over the weekend saying unless I bring in my own roommate or I move in with someone else, I'm going to possibly have someone move in with me," Jun said.
Although there is usually a long wait-list of students who were not housed in the lottery of the previous year, Reitman said that the wait-list this year was much shorter because the Office of Residential Life and Learning (ORLL) managed to house everyone. Therefore, there were fewer students immediately available to fill the vacancies.
Director of ORLL Yolanda King said that Sophia Gordon Hall's debut partially accounts for shifts in the normal housing pattern. Many seniors who did not get into the new dorm opted to live off-campus due to "affordable" rental rates, she said.
King said that the vacancies are not due to the institution of a new lottery system for housing.
The new system takes the average of the numbers of the prospective roommates and replaced the old system where only the lottery number of the highest student was considered, allowing those with high numbers to pull friends with lower numbers into their rooms.
"At this time there is no evidence that this shift with vacancies had anything to do with the change in the distribution of lottery numbers this past year," she said in an e-mail to the Daily.
