Quad residents can view rooms on-line

Patchogue-Medford High School '98 Patchogue, N.Y. Wondering if there will be room for a big-screen television set in your room in the Quad? The answer is probably not, but a new World Wide Web site developed by the Office of Residential Living will allow incoming students to find out the exact space and layout of each room with only a few clicks of the mouse. A virtual visit to http://www.upenn.edu/resliv/roomcharacteristics.html will provide students moving into the Quadrangle with approximate measurements of their rooms. Additional information about whether the space has a view of the courtyard, carpeting, window screens, sinks, fireplaces and closets will be available along with a computer-generated blueprint of the room. Officials in the Office of Residential Living said they hope the plans will provide students with a valuable source of information about their new living accommodations. "What we're trying to do is just give people a better picture of what they're going to be moving into," Marketing Coordinator for Housing Services Lynn Rotoli said. She added that it should prove helpful to students to have "a one-stop presence to familiarize themselves with their rooms prior to move-in." But while each page contains a disclaimer stating that sizes are approximate and drawings are not to scale, some of the blueprints could still be misleading. For example, the Quad contains several three-bedroom triples which are not represented as such in the blueprints. Instead, the floor space is given as if there were no walls dividing the space. Also, the fireplaces included in the drawings have long been filled in with bricks and painted over, providing little more than decorative value. And although all information was current as of last summer, some minor characteristics may have changed by now, such as the possibility of carpeting having been pulled up or window screens installed. Still, current students said they thought the new Web site would be a huge help to incoming freshmen. Although blueprints of the rooms have always been available by mail through the Department of Housing Services, Seroska said having the information available on-line will be much more convenient. "Having it on-line is the simplest way -- you can find out exactly what the room you'll be living in looks like at the same time you're doing all of the other things you'll need to be doing on-line to get ready to come to Penn," she said. Information about each of the 1,117 rooms in the Quad was gathered last summer by a group of students from a local high school and turned into blueprints using a specialized computer program. The rooms in the other residences will be catalogued similarly in the future as time and funding permit, Rotoli said.

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