Monday is the first day of class at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Some first-year students are disappointed with housing that lacks privacy and natural light.
Amelie Lagunas is a first-year student majoring in early childhood education. She’s sharing a windowless student lounge inside Florida Avenue Residence Hall with three other roommates.
“So our room is a little typically different from the typical dorms. We do live in a lounge area. [On] one side, there’s two bunk beds and same on the other side, within the middle there [are] four wardrobes,” said Lagunas.
The lounge is near the hall’s elevators and restrooms.
The University of Illinois said the number of first-year students who signed contracts for dorm rooms was larger than anticipated. First-year students at the university are required to live on campus.
Another lounge resident is first year astrophysics major Lena Hillsberg. She said the housing situation is creating a rough start to her first semester at the state’s flagship university.
“My family’s paying for me to be here and paying for a dorm, paying for my education that is my future. And I think having a steady supply of reassurance is very, very important,” said Hillsberg.
Last month, the U of I began offering returning students $2,000 plus 100 meal tickets to move out of university housing so that there’s more room for freshmen. Many resident assistants are also sharing rooms with first-year students.
Political science major Rylee Graves shares the student lounge with Lagunas and two other students. She said not knowing when she’ll move to a regular dorm room is frustrating.
“Because once we put everything up, we don’t know when we’re going to move out. We don’t know anything about how long we’re going to stay in here. I’ve heard rumors from about a month to a full semester,” said Graves.
But Graves said there is a silver lining. She and her roommates have formed a big friend group.
“We’re in this together. We’re going out together. We make plans together. We have lunch, dinner, breakfast together. So it’s been really great just having such an environment where we all have something in common like this, and we’re all kind of freaked out like this. And it’s just great. I’ve been able to make new people, and it’s an icebreaker. I get to tell them about it. They get to show me their dorm… show me what sort of normal dorm looks like. So it’s a blessing in disguise, socially, but only socially,” said Graves.
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University of Illinois Urbana Champaign student journalist Nathan Gonzalez helped report this story.