Students still living in lounges

It’s safe to say freshman Seungyeob Kim is a little out of his element.

Hailing from South Korea, Kim came to IU hoping – if he had a roommate – to bunk with someone from a different culture and find a new home away from home.

“I hoped to meet some Americans because I need to improve my English,” he said.

Kim never got that chance.

When it came time to find out who his roommates were, Kim learned that he was going to be living with three other students from South Korea, which he said bothered him.

He also learned he would be living in the fifth floor lounge of Curry Hall in Read Center.

IU’s freshman class is its largest in history, which means for the second year in a row many students living in residence halls will sleep in lounges instead of rooms.

At the beginning of the year, 143 students were assigned to live in residence halls, and 41 still do, said Sara Ivey-Lucas, assistant director of housing assignments for Residential Programs and Services.

The majority of students living in campus lounges are either graduate or international students.

IU faced the same problem two years ago when it took four weeks to get about 80 students out of lounges, Ivey-Lucas said.

This year’s problem was almost twice as bad.

Students living in lounges only have to pay 80 percent of the costs of living in an actual room. But Kim said there are few other benefits of living in such a space.

“I think some people didn’t recognize us as living here,” Kim said. “We are kind of isolated in this room. I’m not a very active person, and the culture is different, so I don’t know how to hang out with the Americans.”

Kim was also bothered by other factors of lounge life.

“Other people from around this room kind of bothered me because they thought this was a lounge and would open my doors many times,” Kim said.

Luckily for Kim, some spaces opened up, giving him the living situation he wanted at the beginning of his term at IU.

“A week ago, my roommates left,” he said, “and now I’m pretty good because I have a big room, and it’s alone as I always wished.”

In order to correct these problems, Ivey-Lucas said the campus administration has been working on long-term goals, such as renovating residence halls and building new housing for students.

RPS will start construction later this year to replace buildings that were formerly part of the Ashton complex, said Patrick Connor, executive director of RPS.

The new apartment-style housing is scheduled to open in fall 2010.

For this year, Ivey-Lucas said she hopes, come spring semester, all of the students in lounges will have found new homes in the residence halls.

However, Kim said he feels comfortable in his new element, and he wishes to keep living where he is.

For some students, lounge life is not as glamorous as the one Kim leads now. However, as finals come and go and students leave campus, the 41 remaining students living in lounges will probably find a new home in one of IU’s 10,000 on-campus housing options.

However, Ivey-Lucas said she believes this problem will not go away anytime soon.

“My personal opinion is that our freshman class will always be around 7,000 students,” she said, “and that will always put RPS in the position where we could have overflow housing.”