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This is not how University of Montana freshman James Uhde pictured his first year of college.

Mounds of clothes falling out of university-issued cardboard boxes. Piles of shoes strewn about the floor.

There are no closets in the third-floor Aber Hall study lounge where Uhde and two other students live. Three sets of bunk beds occupy most of the 20-by-15-foot L-shaped room. Uhde set up his desktop computer at the end of his bunk bed. No room on the cluttered communal table.

If there's a bright side to this housing arrangement, it's that three guys occupy this space - not five like earlier in the semester.

“I really don't mind that much,” said Uhde, a computer science major who loves nothing more than taking apart and rebuilding computers. “But then again, I have nothing to compare it to.”

UM is no stranger to overflow housing, but this year, with a record enrollment surpassing 14,000 students came a record number of freshmen with no place to live.

In five of the last seven years, semesters have started with too many students for the dorms.

At the start of the fall semester in August, 148 students set up shop in television lounges and study rooms all across campus. Earlier this year, 10 students lived in a television lounge in Craig Hall.

Typically students have transitioned into dorm rooms as they became available after only several weeks.

This year, 11 weeks after the start of school, 29 students have given up on the idea of “interim” housing.

“I should be gone next, but I'm doubtful,” said 18-year-old Tyler Zeak of Great Falls, who lives in the same lounge as Uhde. “I'm ready for this semester to be over.”

The likelihood of moving students out of the study lounges before Christmas break is slim, said Ron Brunell, UM director of residence life. Come spring semester, because of attrition, all will have dorm rooms, he said.

“The enrollment figure surprised a lot of people on campus,” Brunell said. “It's good for the university, but with those numbers, it presents some issues.”

Issues such as 124 extra men and 24 extra women and no place to put them.

These students applied late - meaning, after mid-July - for campus housing. The last application for housing was submitted three days after classes had already begun, Brunell said.

When the men living in the third-floor study lounge first moved in, there was no Internet, Zeak said. Two lights didn't work.

“This is too long to be stuck,” said Zeak, who doesn't think he should be punished for deciding in July that UM-Western in Dillon was not the right fit for him. “It bothers me (living here), but I've learned to get used to it.”

Other students got housing first. A crowded television room and study lounge in the basement of Craig Hall and Miller Hall were cleared out, regardless of housing application submission. Orders of the fire marshal, Brunell said. Three weeks into the semester, the university placed all the women.

All freshmen are required by the university to live on campus their first year. It helps the transition from high school to college, Brunell said. Retention improves. Students build a network of friends and get more involved in the university, he said.

The administration allowed freshman living in lounges to move off campus a month into the semester. Also at that time, these students were notified they would be getting a discount on their board for every day they lived in a study lounge.

A freshman living in a two-person dorm room on campus pays an average of $14.30 a day, Brunell said. Those living in interim housing will pay $7. Their money will be refunded to them in a lump sum when alternative housing is found, he said.

Uhde has a scholarship that requires he stay on campus. So, his only option is to wait.

“I have no one to blame other than myself,” said Uhde, who admits to procrastinating when it came to his housing application, despite his mother's constant reminders.

“I told him he needed to get his ducks in a row,” said Uhde's mother, Beth Smith of Polson. “He's playing the cards he dealt.”

Smith is not too concerned about her son's living situation.

“He fortunately is very adaptable,” she said. “If he's doing fine, then I'm doing fine.”

Record enrollment is only part of the reason for the high housing overflow this year. There's also a trend nationwide of more upperclassmen choosing to live on campus, Brunell said. With the price of gas and energy prices as high as they were last year and earlier this summer, students saw living on campus as convenient and more economical, he said.

It's difficult to predict enrollment numbers a year out. Still, the university is trying to plan now for overflow problems next fall. University administrators have reached out to private innkeepers in town about possibly housing students, and are throwing around the idea of transforming the offices in Corbin Hall - which connects to Brantley Hall - back into a dormitory. That could provide an additional 75 to 80 student spaces, Brunell said.

The university is also looking at policy changes, such as only taking as many students into interim housing as it can place in a dorm.

“We are looking at a lot of things,” he said. “You can't anticipate what will come up.”

Reporter Chelsi Moy can be reached at 523-5260 or at chelsi.moy@missoulian.com.

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