Bridget Fitzgerald and Lesley Stefan have the sort of living arrangement you’d expect for a couple of lowly Syracuse University freshmen. Their open-double dorm room, perched high atop Mount Olympus in Day Hall, is cramped and stiflingly hot. The building’s hot water plumbing runs through their closets, so the girls were forced to leave the window open all winter to keep from sweating in their cinder block cubicle.

‘We think it used to be a closet and they just made it a room,’ said Fitzgerald, an undecided freshman in The College of Arts and Sciences.

Needless to say, when it came time to arrange their housing for next year, the girls weren’t interested in sticking around. Trapped in their two-year housing requirement, they enlisted the support of one of their floormates, Lindsay Truesdell, an undecided freshman in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and set their sights on a three-bedroom South Campus apartment.

All three had racked up enough Advanced Placement credits in high school to gain sophomore standing, so their combined housing reservation number was a relatively low 6701.66. After scouring last year’s numbers, they found 7684.66 to be the cutoff for the apartments, and they were sure they’d get in. They started planning their new, apartment-dwelling lifestyle, complete with magazines in the bathroom and a shower they didn’t have to share with a floor full of strangers.

‘We were very much looking forward to independent living, at least more than what we have now,’ Fitzgerald said.

And then it came, the little pink slip of paper telling them they had missed the cut. They were going to have to try their luck in Phase III of the housing process, where the priority of reservation numbers reverses, favoring those with higher numbers.

Between 1,200 and 1,350 students go through Phase III every year, said David Kohr, director of the Office of Housing, Meal Plan and ID Card Services. After single and learning community rooms are doled out in Phase I and most of the suites and South Campus apartments fill up in Phase II, students in Phase III must compete over double rooms and the remaining suites.

The reason that current freshmen, even those with low registration numbers, get bumped to Phase III is obvious: there simply aren’t enough suites and apartments available to accommodate all the people who want one, Kohr said.

‘We can’t have everything in the world available to them,’ he said.

Fitzgerald, Stefan and Truesdell’s odds of getting their dream apartment in Phase II weren’t great, Kohr said, since only 160 of the 764 South Campus apartments have three bedrooms.

‘Being naive freshmen, we didn’t realize that deciding to have three people would be a big mistake,’ Fitzgerald said.

With the reverse order of selection in Phase III, they still face an uphill battle. Kohr believes that the reason for the switch is to give those freshmen with high numbers a shot at suites or apartments.

‘It works out for some people and not for others,’ he said.

Freshmen looking for suites and apartments aren’t the only ones getting the short end of the stick in Phase III. T.J. Martin, a sophomore information studies and marketing major, went into Phase III last year looking for a double room anywhere but Day Hall, where he lived freshman year. Because of their low combined registration number, Martin and his roommate wound up right back in Day. It wasn’t a big problem for Martin. After all, things could have been worse.

‘It wasn’t that big of a deal at all,’ he said. ‘As long as it wasn’t B.B., it wasn’t a problem.’

For some prospective sophomores, getting stuck in the bleak cityscape that is Brewster and Boland Residence Halls is a very real possibility. But this year’s competition in Phase III isn’t expected to be as stiff as in other years, since this year’s freshman class was smaller than it has been in the past, Kohr said.

‘Overall, there’ll be fewer people going through the whole process this year,’ he said.

Those students who aren’t happy with their housing assignments after Phase III have a few options. They can sign up for the housing waiting list starting April 23. Then, the reservation priority switches back to the lowest numbers for waiting list requests. Students, especially those seeking apartments on South, have a good chance of getting what they want, since many people cancel their housing during the summer.

Other students might decide to look for lodgings off campus. For freshmen like Fitzgerald, Stefan and Truesdell, the only way out of their two-year housing requirement is to submit a petition showing financial, medical or personal need.

‘If someone is contemplating doing that, now is the time to do it,’ Kohr said, citing the need to free up housing space for those who want to stay on campus.

Yet those who head off campus will also face the challenge of securing a lease on short notice. Most of the prime locations for next year are probably already taken, but students can still find apartment listings on orangehousing.com, an independent Web site that offers listings for the university area, said Laura Madelone, director of the Office of Off-Campus Student Services.

For now, Fitzgerald, Stefan and Truesdell are planning to stay in the reservation process, but they aren’t taking their housing misfortunes laying down. After hearing Vice Chancellor Deborah Freund discuss Syracuse University’s efforts to keep its top students from transferring, Stefan decided to send Freund a letter. She and Fitzgerald believe they are being penalized in Phase III of the housing process for coming to SU with a slew of AP credits, a factor that lowered their housing number. Stefan thinks that unless top students are given priority in areas other than academics, they’ll continue leaving in droves.

‘You need to realize that a big part of the reason people leave is the social scene,’ she said. ‘If you stick them in the ghetto, they’re not going to stay.’

Published on April 6, 2004 at 12:00 pm