Whitman to convert rooms

“But when I saw my room had a window on the door, I told myself, ‘This is weird. This couldn’t be the right room,’ ” Williams said. Williams is also a copy editor for The Daily Princetonian.

The room Williams had drawn into was in fact a study room. She noted that, in addition to a window on the door, the room was complete with tables, chairs and a blackboard.

“I laughed for a full five minutes,” Williams said. She then proceeded to contact Housing and Real Estate Services to find out whether this room assignment had been a mistake. She learned that the selection had not been a mistake and that Whitman College was planning to convert a number of study rooms into single occupancy rooms for the 2012-13 school year.

Williams was one of several students in Whitman College who selected a current study room as their future dorm room for the upcoming school year. While the college did not inform students of this course of action on the housing website, Whitman had been planning this change with the Office of Housing and Real Estate Services beforehand.

Dean of Whitman College Rebecca Graves-Bayazitoglu said the decision to convert the study rooms came in response to increased interest in Whitman housing among upperclass students.

“Here at Whitman we worked with Housing to determine which study spaces were best suited to be student rooms,” Graves-Bayazitoglu said in an email. “We’re happy to welcome a few more Whitmanites into the college, given the demand for Whitman spaces that we see in the rising senior and rising junior draws.”

According to a 2004 article published on the Princeton University website, one of the original aims in constructing Whitman College was to help accommodate a student body whose size would increase by 11 percent.

Housing Services did not respond to multiple requests for comment. University spokesperson Martin Mbugua said Whitman College and the Office of Housing Services identified three study rooms to convert into singles to accommodate increased class sizes.

“As enrollment approached the current steady state, we made the change to make sure we had sufficient room for all our students,” Mbugua said in an email.

Despite the surprise, Williams said that she was “very happy” with her future living arrangement, adding, “I want to see if they can leave the chalkboard.”

Julia Carroll ’15 also described the discovery of drawing into a study room as “a bit of a shock.” She explained that her room draw time was at 10:02 a.m., but the Housing website began to experience technical difficulties at 10:01 a.m. She had to sprint to New South in order to draw for one of the last available singles in Whitman. She said Housing and Real Estate Services did not inform her that she was drawing into a study room.

While Carroll considers herself lucky to have been assigned a single, she noted that the dimensions of the room are “pretty small.” She estimated that her room next year is about 30 square feet smaller than her current living arrangement, while Williams noted that her future room is approximately 90 square feet smaller than her current room.