As upperclassmen returned this year from fall quarters spent abroad, 31 undergraduate students were assigned to graduate housing in Crothers Hall and Crothers Memorial Hall when Housing reprised its annual struggle to find sufficient space for undergraduates.

Some students who waited until the walk-in round, however, rather than applying for housing prior to going abroad, were able to obtain highly desirable rooms in undergraduate residences in a process that generated some resentment.

“In recent years, the number of undergraduates returning to campus Winter Quarter has been too high to accommodate all students in undergraduate residences,” said Director of Student Housing Assignments Sue Nunan. As a result, she said, students were assigned to graduate housing with the option to move when additional space becomes available in undergraduate housing later in the quarter.

Crothers and Crothers Memorial, she added, have “been a fairly popular option because of the availability of single rooms, because room rates are somewhat less than in undergraduate dormitories, and because [they] are close to Green Library and the center of campus.”

Crothers Memorial is a dormitory-style building, with long navy blue carpeted hallways and cinderblock walls. The rooms available to undergraduates this year included nine singles and eleven one-room doubles comparable in size to rooms in Stern Hall.

Junior Carl Moore was assigned to a Crothers single when he returned from Oxford this quarter. Due to a housing problem, he was unassigned after the first round of housing. He was placed on the waiting list and eventually given a room in graduate housing. Moore said that he was not particularly upset about the situation.

“[Housing] was really sympathetic,” he said. “I really appreciate that once they discovered there was a glitch they tried to make the best of the situation.”

Juniors Mason DePasse and George Levitte were assigned to a one-room double in Crothers Memorial after their quarters spent abroad in Australia and Berlin, respectively.

Their primary complaint is that Crothers is antisocial.

“Everyone is so quiet that we’re probably the loudest ones,” Levitte said. “There might be one open door somewhere else [in Crothers]... [but] it is another undergraduate.”

DePasse was resigned about his assignment, noting that although Crothers is antisocial, there are some benefits.

“I like that I don’t have a meal plan,” he said, “because Stanford Dining jacks up the prices.”

However, despite this benefit, DePasse was still frustrated with his housing assignment.

“For me, it’s a waste of my preferred year,” he said.

Some students with lower housing priorities, however, were assigned to better housing in undergraduate residences in the walk-in round.

“I got into better housing than people assigned in the first round,” said junior Meredith Bell, who obtained a room in Narnia as a walk-in after stopping out and spending a quarter volunteering in Africa. Although Bell had to send a friend as a proxy during walk-in assignments, she thought the walk-in process was fairly easy to accomplish.

DePasse expressed some resentment at the inequality produced by the separate rounds of housing assignments.

“I think I got a much lower draw number than people who got into housing that I put on my list,” he said.

Nunan pointed out that the process did achieve its primary goal this year.

“At this time,” she said, “all undergraduates have been offered an assignment for Winter Quarter.”