Eloise, The College Years: BU Students Snag Swank Digs

Although freshmen trapped in Canaday’s cinderblock cells may envy their Apley Court peers, even the best-situated Harvard students would kill to live in certain Boston University dorms—namely the Hyatt Regency and the Holiday Inn.

For more than a decade, BU has been solving its housing shortage problem by stashing a few hundred freshmen in local hotels. This year, there are 484 students residing in the Hyatt and 120 shacking up in the Holiday Inn, according to the Daily Free Press, Boston University’s student newspaper. In the second semester, however, the hotel occupants will be squeezed into the dorms vacated by upperclassmen studying abroad.

Although the BU students in hotels live farther from campus than other freshmen, they are compensated for the inconvenience with bi-weekly maid service, private bathrooms, and access to an indoor pool.

And while the hotels’ luxurious double beds have been replaced with standard dorm issue furniture to simulate the college experience, Holiday Inn resident Stephen Cattall, BU Class of 2010, says “who really cares about furniture when the sauna is only an elevator ride away?”

Partly due to high student satisfaction, BU is in no hurry to find alternatives to the current situation. University spokesman Colin D. Riley explains, “BU has more beds than any private college in the country, but we would much rather give students a hotel room than squeeze a third person into a double.”

And conveniently, the hotels are happy to house BU’s overflow. Pia Kalmkeryan, the Holiday Inn’s Assistant Front Office Manager, says “the students have been very courteous to our staff, and I have yet to hear a single complaint about noise.”

BU Director of Residence Life David J. Zamojski, however, is concerned about the upcoming transition to on-campus dorms. “The students living in the hotels really built a tight-knit community, and it saddens me that most of them are split up in January and forced to adjust to new roommates.”

Indeed, Cattall said that he would prefer staying in the Inn to moving into a BU dorm. “I am going to miss having a huge TV in the middle of my dorm and someone to clean up twice a week,” he says. Wouldn’t we all.