The end of the school year did not signal the end of a troubled room assignment process on West Campus.
Residence Life and Housing Services discovered in mid-July that three rooms in Crowell Quadrangle had been double-booked, forcing two pairs of students to relocate elsewhere on West.
"I remember it very clearly, because I was quite upset," said sophomore Christine Contreras, one of the students who was asked to move. "It was around the end of July that I received a message on my answering machine saying that housing had made a terrible mistake and they hadn't realized until just now and I needed to call immediately."
She was told that in a review of housing assignments, RLHS had discovered that three rooms had been assigned both to members of the Wellness Living Learning Community and several unaffiliated sophomores.
Only two pairs of roommates were forced to move in the end, said Jen Frank, program coordinator at RLHS in charge of room assignments. They were offered alternative housing on West, with Contreras and her roommate moving to Kilgo Quadrangle and another pair-both Chronicle staff members-moving to Wannamaker Quadrangle.
"The students who had not been booked were seniors," she said. "We don't check for seniors, because they're not required to live on campus."
Frank said the switch to a new online Room Pix caused many problems this year.
"This is my fifth year [in this job] and that's the first time that I'm aware of where there was double booking," she said. "To some degree that's because we were dealing with a new process."
The closing of Few Quadrangle for renovations this semester displaced five selective living groups to elsewhere on West, and RLHS officials said they miscalculated the demand for housing on West.
During the room selection process, it emerged that there would be too few rooms to accommodate all rising sophomores. On the final day of RoomPix in April, it was discovered that nearly 60 sophomore women were without housing.
As a result, several sophomores were forced to live on Central Campus for the first time in years. It had been University policy that all sophomores would live on West, a policy that has been temporarily suspended.
Frank added that she hoped students' faith in RLHS would not be shaken and that they would understand the difficulties of adjusting to the online selection system.
"Really, what happened this year is we obviously made a mistake in our projections," she said. "I would hope that students still have confidence in us given that we reacted quickly."
Contreras said although she was happy with her new assignment, she was upset about being forced to move in the first place because she had a good lottery pick and had chosen exactly the room she wanted, near friends.
But she added that she found RLHS's error surprising.
"I can't believe they made just a huge mistake like that," Contreras said. "The fact that they didn't realize this earlier is what really had shocked me."
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