Due to a housing crunch, graduate students will move into Mirrielees in the fall. The decision to open the dorm to graduate students was made at the start of this quarter in response the high number of undergraduate vacancies expected in the fall, said Todd Benson, director of housing assignment services.

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Nina Gonzaludo

Due to a high number of expected undergraduate vacancies in the fall, graduate students will move into Mirrielees.

“We have graduate students who apply for housing for the fall, but they are unable to get it,” he said. “Currently, we have about 300 unassigned grad students waiting for housing next fall. If there are vacancies in housing on campus, then we’d like to give spaces to the students who need them.”

Benson added that graduate students will be placed in one wing on one floor of Mirrielees, which would not constitute “a significant number of spaces.” Two people will inhabit each of these apartments and the board fee will be equivalent to the rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Escondido Village.

Graduate students will only be allowed to live in Mirrielees during the fall and are expected to move at the end of the quarter.

“There will be on-campus housing guaranteed for them after the autumn quarter,” Benson said. “If the students would like to stay on campus, then we will assign them elsewhere, and there will be spots open in other grad residences.”

Some undergraduates, however, were dismayed at the idea of graduate students inhabiting the extra spaces.

“I did not get a low draw number, and my draw group was considering Mirrielees as one of our top choices,” said sophomore Kopal Kulkarni. “But once we heard that graduate students would be living in Mirrielees, and it would be harder for undergraduates to get into Mirrielees, we felt a bit discouraged about drawing in there.”

Benson denied that the change impacted the housing lottery.

“Draw cut-offs can change from year to year regardless of who is living in a house, so it would be hard to say if Mirrielees’ cut-off for this year was due to the graduate students coming in or simply more undergraduate student desire to live there,” Benson said.

Still, Kulkarni stressed the importance of having apartment-style options available to undergraduates.

“I think that since there is a housing crunch, it might be necessary to give up some spaces, but it takes away the opportunity for undergraduates to live in an apartment setting since Mirrielees is the only apartment-style housing on campus,” she said. “I think we should have more apartment-style options for undergrads because at Stanford most people live on campus, so it’s important to have the experience of being independent and living in an apartment sometime during your college career, before going out into the real world.”

Sophomore Aditya Singh, who lived in Mirrielees earlier this year, said that the addition of graduate students would further dampen the dorm’s social atmosphere.

“I’m against the idea of putting grad students into Mirrielees,” he said. “The place isn’t very social. It’s hard enough to meet people in Mirrielees without having grad students there too. There is a huge divide between undergraduates and grad students on campus, so I feel that just putting a group of grad students into an undergraduate dorm wouldn’t work.”

However, Benson said the merits of housing graduate students in Mirrielees outweighed the disadvantages.

“It would be unfortunate to not offer graduate students housing if they needed it,” he said.