Joshua Sopko got a late start on college, but when he did, he wanted to attend a school where he could live in dorms.
“Dorms are in the movies, and I always wanted to go to school at like a university,” said Sopko, 22. He came to Edmonds Community College from Anchorage, Alaska, because it offers college housing in an apartment building across the street from campus.
Due in part to demand from students like Sopko, the college will build a new four-story residence hall on campus, set to open in fall 2009. The hall will also accommodate the influx of international students who, far from home, want campus housing where they can meet others.
The college now offers housing for 60 students in an apartment building it leases from the YWCA. The other apartment buildings in the complex are low-income.
The situation is not ideal, said Luke Botzheim, housing director at the college.
“We said no to about 100 students this past summer for the residence hall,” he said, adding that there’s a wait list. The new residence hall will house about 150 students.
The apartment building is aging, he said.
“It’s getting to be older and kind of run down,” he said. “We have families coming and saying, ‘This isn’t where we want my student to stay.’”
Even so, the demand to live there is great because many students want a place to meet other students, socialize and avoid a commute. The desire can be more acute for the roughly 700 international students at the college, who come from afar and can struggle to get their bearings at first. If they don’t get into the residence hall, they live with local families.
A community college can be a tougher place to make friends than a university, where many students live on-campus their first year.
Many community college students attend school part-time or have jobs, so they tend to come to class and then leave, Botzheim said.
“(There are) those who are looking for that connection, a place to hang out,” he said. “There’s not a lot of that on campus.”
Sopko said he’s made some friends in the residence halls, but also through classes. The best part of living in college housing is there’s a place for his friends to come over and hang out after class.
“If we want to grab something to eat and everybody’s broke I have something in the kitchen,” he said. “There’s not that many places (on campus) you can just hang out that are actually comfortable.”
Escaping a commute is another draw to college housing.
“I had never lived in a big city before, and if I had to drive all the time, I don’t know I would’ve gotten through the whole year,” Sopko said.
Of the college’s current apartments, Sopko said he’s lived in nicer places, but that the bedrooms are more spacious than other dorm rooms he’s seen.
“I’m a college kid,” he said. “I can live anywhere.”
Construction on the new hall is planned for spring 2008.
The hall will have 32 four-bedroom apartments, six two-bedroom apartments, 11 studios, common space on each floor and a room for laundry. It will also have Internet access.
Officials are in the final stages of hammering down details, Botzheim said.
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