Demand will cause dorms to squeeze in more students

Upperclassmen trying to get campus housing next year may not need to check in to the Sheraton Hotel as a last resort.

The University is implementing plans to account for the greater number of expected upperclassman projected to need rooms, though officials refused to estimate the increase in the number of students that could be accommodated.

According to Ellie Rupsis, associate director of housing administration, approximately 2,700 upperclassmen apply for housing each year. However, with the larger than normal rising sophomore class, Penn is planning to accommodate a larger number of students.

"We are expecting [a shortage] because ... those extra freshmen, or at least some percentage of them, are going to be looking to return to campus housing," Rupsis said.

Officials are relieving the housing crunch by reserving a floor of Sansom Place East for upperclassmen and redesigning rooms in the Quadrangle and high rises.

Rupsis said that singles and triples recently converted from higher-capacity rooms will no longer afford their residents the extra space and will instead be reconverted back to doubles and quads to accommodate extra students.

In the fall semester, rooms in the Sheraton University City Hotel at 36th and Chestnut streets were rented to accommodate upperclassmen displaced from rooms by the large incoming freshman class.

Rupsis noted that one of the problems students run into during room selection is that they are unwilling to accept the available space.

"The more open they are to different housing, the better chance they have of getting a room," she said.

In addition to the housing crunch, some students find the room selection process confusing.

For Engineering sophomore Jay Olman, finding out what rooms are available and how to apply was a problem because of the variation between the different college houses.

Harnwell College House and Stouffer College House, for example, run their own in-house selection process.

Rupsis said that the choice to run the in-house room selection process is left up to each house dean.

Ware House Dean Nathan Smith said that the process can seem complicated, but that there is a lot of work that goes into placing students.

"I think to the outside it can seem like it's somehow disorganized to have this much variation from house to house," Smith said. "From the inside, I would say it provides a lot of liberty for designing things around the character that [a particular] house has taken on."

The Harnwell House lottery is one of the processes that is run differently, and the selection of a room can come down to the draw of a card.

For Harnwell's in-house room selection, each group applying for a room is assigned a number based on the number of average semesters each roommate has lived in the house. The groups with the highest averages select a playing card to decide in what order they will pick their future room.

Wharton and Engineering junior Brian Dodd, along with three roommates, got the room they wanted.

His roommate "just got lucky and drew an ace," giving their team priority in the selection process.

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