New campus apartments filled in 8 minutes

Michael McKay

The Apartments at 1302 Kentucky Street, offered through the department of Housing and Residence Life, went fast Monday morning.

Registration for the apartments opened up at 7 a.m. for rising seniors, and within eight minutes, all 36 units of the apartments were full.

Cuba, Ky., junior Leah Beth Dublin, woke up at 6:30 a.m. to prepare for the registration.

“We had the T.V. on because they go on international time,” Dublin said.

As soon as The Today Show came on, Dublin said she went to TopNet.

The registration website was open on two different browsers in case there was any issue, she said.

Dublin said she got an error message as soon as she clicked the first available apartment, room 203.

“I think a lot of people clicked 203 at the same time,” Dublin said.

Dublin used her other browser and was able to get a room in the apartments and moved her friend into the room with her.

“This was all in the span of a minute, probably,” she said.

Other errors caused students to get kicked off the system.

Kit Tolbert, director of operations for HRL, came into the HRL office at 7 a.m. in case students had any issues with the registration process.

Tolbert said she answered calls from rising seniors in the Honors College who weren’t able to access the apartments because of their honors credits.

“I took those calls real early,” Tolbert said. “Hopefully if we have something that becomes available we’ll be to work with those students.”

Louisville junior Aaron Daley was one of the students who was kicked off for not having enough Honors credit, even though the apartments aren’t considered Honors housing.

“I was really frustrated this morning,” Daley said.

Daley said he didn’t know that his Honors credit would factor into getting into an apartment.

“Being in honors actually hurt,” he said.

Daley said he went to HRL and put his name on a waiting list after he explained what happened.

Tolbert said 10 names were on the waiting list as of 3 p.m.

She said the waiting list isn’t just for students in the Honors College.

“I don’t know if anything will open up, but if it’s like on-campus housing, people will sign up and then change their mind, or something will happen and they’ll have to back out,” she said. “We just wanted to have some people waiting just in case.”

Daley said the person he was going to live with got into the apartments with someone else, and that he will stay in McLean if he doesn’t get into an apartment, or if he doesn’t know his new roommate.

“I wouldn’t live there if it was with someone I didn’t know,” he said.