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The Dartmouth
July 8, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

New Hamp to open Spring term

New Hampshire residence hall, which will house approximately 101 students, will be re-open Spring term.
New Hampshire residence hall, which will house approximately 101 students, will be re-open Spring term.

ORL has long known that construction on New Hamp would be finished by Spring term as there have been no significant construction delays, but waited to gauge student demand for Spring term housing before ultimately deciding to open up the building, Redman said.

"There's a need to open [New Hamp] based on the number of people who have applied for housing," Redman said in an interview.

Housing applications for Spring term were due to ORL by Feb. 10.

New Hamp will house approximately half of its 101 residents in single occupancy rooms, and the remainder in one-and two-room doubles, according to floor plans posted on the ORL web site. The building housed 118 students before the renovation, but ORL decided to include more single-, rather than double- or triple- occupancy rooms because of student preferences, Redman said.

The housing office did not include New Hamp as an option on the Spring term housing application because the office had not been told whether the building would be open, director of undergraduate housing Rachael Class-Giguere told The Dartmouth in an e-mail. Students who specifically asked housing office staff members about New Hamp were told to indicate their preference on the comments section of the application with the understanding that the building might not be open, she added.

The housing office will notify students of their spring housing assignments during the first week of March, Class-Giguere said.

Students interviewed by The Dartmouth said they understood why New Hamp was not officially listed on the application, but that the housing office's decision to inform certain students that the building was a potential option was unfair.

"I definitely would have requested to live in New Hamp if that was an option," Karen Iorio '10 said. "The housing office should have provided everyone with the same information."

Students who apply for housing for the Winter, Spring or Summer terms are placed into rooms by housing office staff, who consider a student's indicated preference for a specific roommate, type of room and building location, Redman said. Students are assigned to rooms in the order of their housing priority numbers.

In choosing residents for the new building, the housing office will consider students who asked to be placed in other residence halls near New Hamp and who indicated a preference for the types of rooms available in New Hamp, as well as those who specifically asked to be placed in the residence hall, Glass-Giguere said in her e-mail.

"For example, even if someone didn't ask for [New Hamp] but asked for a two-room double, if we didn't have a two-room double in the cluster on their list, we assigned them to New Hamp," Glass-Giguere wrote.

Redman said opening a previously-unoccupied building to the housing pool will allow the Housing office to meet more students' preferences.

The housing office often experiences difficulty satisfying student demand for the Spring term, he said. Many of the students who apply for new housing in the spring are juniors, who tend to request singles, Redman said. Students vacating College rooms in the spring, however, are often members of the sophomore class, who routinely live in triple-occupancy rooms, Redman said.

This means many returning juniors must be placed into triple rooms, joining roommates they have not previously met.

This year, the housing office can place more returning students into the previously unoccupied singles in New Hamp, Redman said

"For this year and probably this year only, we have the opportunity to provide people with what they want," he said.

Next year, Redman explained, the singles in New Hamp will probably be chosen by seniors during fall room draw.

Renovations to New Hamp began in Winter 2008. The new interior of the building has been completed, with the exception of "final touches," including fixing non-functional light switches, Redman said. Work to the exterior of the building and surrounding landscaping will be completed in the spring when the weather improves.