As new and returning students settle into their dorm rooms this
week they will be able to escape from the small cubicles they call
home by relaxing, studying and socializing in their floor study
lounges. This has not always been the case.
For the past five years, students have had to live in study
lounges along with five other roommates due to overcrowding in
on-campus housing. This year, after input from the On Campus
Housing Council and Undergraduate Student Association, housing
officials were able to eliminate this problem by assigning more
students to triple rooms.
According to Director of Housing Michael Foraker, 48 percent of
the students living on campus last year were in triples, as opposed
to the 53 percent of residents that have two roommates this
year.
Last year 254 students were assigned to study lounges; this year
no students will live in lounges.
Foraker said he was “ecstatic” and
“couldn’t be happier” with the current status of
study lounges. He said he never wanted to use lounges to
accommodate residents in the first place, but as resident
population increased over the years, they became a necessary
solution to fulfill the institution’s promise of guaranteed
housing.
The overcrowding can be attributed to the increase in
second-years returning to on-campus housing and the number of
students attending UCLA, Foraker said in a previous interview.
Last year, the lounge situation was at its worst due to the
delay in De Neve Plaza’s opening. In past years study lounges
were occupied only during fall quarter, but last winter quarter 102
students were still living in lounges.
The extreme circumstances pushed students and officials to work
to assure lounges would actually be open for studying and
socializing. Assigning more students to triples turned out to be
the most feasible plan. Foraker said the staff would like to use
triples as alternatives to lounge housing in the future.
While students have different opinions about triples, they all
seem to agree on the fact that study lounges should be accessible
to residents.
First-year biology student, Bonyamin Cham, who lives in a triple
on the second floor of Dykstra, likes his living conditions.
“If you don’t like one roommate you might like the
other,” Cham said about why he didn’t mind living in a
triple.
He wouldn’t want to live in a study lounge because they
are not made to live in. Cham plans to use the lounges in the
future to study and attend floor meetings.
Melvin Ku, a second-year sociology and physiological science
student, is living in a triple on the fourth floor of Dykstra and
lived in one last year. He thinks triples are really cramped and it
can be like “struggling through a dirty kid’s
room,” but he compromised in order to live with his
friends.
Ku’s floor last year had lounge residents, and he said he
was “disturbed at that fact that their living conditions were
so decrepit.”
Ku said the rooms didn’t have curtains and got extremely hot.
When he and other members of the floor government needed to meet,
they had to use another floor lounge, which made them feel like
they were intruding.
First-year Thu Phan, who also lives in a triple, wanted to have
two other roommates. Phan said if she doesn’t like it, then
she doesn’t have to have two roommates next year.
Even though Phan gets along well with her roommates, “it
would be too overcrowded with more than three people.”
She plans on using the study lounge and said she is glad she
can.
Ku expressed the general feeling among residents when he said he
was “quite content” now that “the option of
studying in the lounge is open as opposed to that liberty being
taken away.”