Members of the Class of 2018 will fill Butterfield Hall in the fall in an effort to accommodate the largest class in College history, which contains roughly 100 more students than the Class of 2017, undergraduate housing director Rachael Class-Giguere said.
While all freshmen and sophomores are guaranteed on-campus accommodations, some junior and senior students who submitted housing applications have been placed on the waitlist, Class-Giguere said. Given the lack of surplus rooms, these students may not receive housing, she said, and those who requested housing after the deadline also may not receive housing.
“Any new vacancies we are getting are because current students who have signed up for fall housing have had a change in their plans and canceled,” she said.
One student who made a last minute decision to stay on in the fall, Leda Espinoza ’16, said that while it is exciting that so many students chose to attend the College she is frustrated to not have a room.
“I know I am in this spot by my own doing, but still it’s frustrating because people say it is so easy to change your D-Plan and you can do it on such short notice,” Espinoza said. “Finding housing has been such a struggle.”
Most transfer students will live in the East Wheelock cluster, Class-Giguere said. Exchange students will be scattered amongst dorms on campus, she said, in a change from past years when they have been mostly concentrated in Butterfield.
Julie Shabto ’14 lived in Butterfield during her freshman year. She said that the building’s small size made it easy for all the residents to become a closely-bonded group.
“It was really nice that everyone had their own space, but it was a very open environment,” she said. “Everyone kept their doors open all the time.”
The Dartmouth Outing Club first-year trips program and the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, both programs that work closely with freshmen, will not require changes, according to trips director Gerben Scherpbier ’14 and Institute for Writing and Rhetoric director Christiane Donahue, respectively.
Despite the record-breaking 1,080 participants, the trips program will not change the number of trips offered, Scherpbier said. Most students who are not participating are varsity football and soccer athletes, Scherpbier said.
“When we did get the increase in students, we were a little worried about that, but it did not end up being a problem because we basically filled up more of the spots on the trips,” he said. “In past years there has been a bunch of empty spaces on the trips, so if it was a 10 person capacity kayak trip, we might have had six to eight [spots] filled. This year we almost filled up every single trip.”
The hardest logistical change was planning and reworking those sections of trips held in Hanover and at the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, since some sections have more total students than planned, Scherpbier said. He noted that some of the later sections contain more than 150 students.
The expense of trips has stayed relatively constant, Scherpbier said, since there are more students paying, which has offset the increased transportation and food costs.
Some academic programs popular among freshmen say that they will not alter plans for the upcoming year.
The Writing 2-3 and Writing 5 programs will not see changes from previous years, Donahue wrote in an email.Math 3, Math 8 and Math 11 courses, often taken by freshmen, will instead see slightly larger class sizes, department chair Diana Williams said.
“We’ll be able to handle those 100 students without much concern, because we are already running lecture style courses in those introductory courses,” Williams said. “Once you have 40 students in a room, going to 50 or 60 doesn’t dramatically change the dynamic. Once you get over 100, then the students feel anonymous and that changes the behavior of the class. But I think we will stay in the window where the dynamic will stay the same.”
