The Department of Residence Life will make 26 four-person apartments in the new Ridgewood residence halls available to all interested juniors and seniors when the dorms open next semester, ResLife announced on its Web site.In an earlier interview with the Justice, Vice President of Capital Projects Dan Feldman said that Ridgewood will provide 184 beds total. However, Co-Director of Residence Life Jeremy Leiferman explained that the University will not make all apartments available because of the disturbance expected from the neighboring construction of the new admissions building.

According to the ResLife Web site, all the Ridgewood bedrooms are singles. There are four- and six-person apartments in the three Ridgewood buildings, Leiferman said. Each apartment has a private bathroom, common area and kitchen, which includes a stove, oven, dishwasher, full-size refrigerator and microwave. Each building has airconditioning, laundry facilities and an elevator, as well as a common room in the entry area. Students living in Ridgewood will not be required to be on a meal plan, Leiferman said.

The Web site notes that students could potentially face unforeseen difficulties in the building stemming from the recent construction that will not be apparent until occupancy. Leiferman explained that this is a normal concern for new buildings and that ResLife does not expect major problems. "Sometimes people move in to a newly constructed building and expect things to be perfect," he said. "A light bulb might not work on the first day, so people might just need to be patient while some of that smaller stuff is figured out."

"If we have more groups than apartments, then we will randomly select groups" through a lottery, he said According to the Reslife Web site, "more apartments may be available if the demand is greater than twenty-six groups."

Students currently studying abroad will also be eligible to apply, Leiferman said. "We did not want to give priority to any particular student group," he said. "That's not the way we generally operate."

According to the ResLife Web site, the application will be available on Oct. 13 and must be submitted by Oct. 31. Leiferman said ResLife would inform students after that date whether they will be able to live in Ridgewood. Groups will then be assigned a time to attend a special room selection session on Nov. 13 to choose a specific apartment.

"Students will know going into the actual room selection [that] they're going to be able to get an apartment," Leiferman said. "The process is designed this way differently than the normal room selection process because it's only focused on one quad, and it's a smaller group of students." He said having students sign up as groups instead of as individuals would make the process more streamlined and transparent.

Over the last year, students on the University's Residence Life Advisory Committee gave input to ResLife administrators on their plans for the quad.

"There was a rumor that they were going to put midyears in there," Ziv Quad Senator Andrew Brooks '09, who has been a member of the committee for three years, said. He also said that the committee members thought it would be a bad idea to put midyears there because they would be far away from the rest of the first-year class.