When first-year communication studies major Grace Carolonza applied for apartment-style on-campus housing at Northeastern, she never expected to be put in an apartment almost an hour’s walk to campus.

“When I looked on the map, I saw it was closer to Boston University and a 50-minute walk from Northeastern,” Carolonza said. “This would make it challenging to become involved in clubs and meet people, two crucial aspects when one is trying to become integrated in a community. Commonwealth would be isolating, and this could be detrimental to a freshman who is unfamiliar with the Northeastern community.”

1110 Commonwealth Ave. is a Northeastern housing complex in Allston, near Boston University. Carolonza received her housing assignment while in Rome with the N.U.in program. She said she put the location in a map in her phone multiple times because she couldn’t believe the location.

The Commonwealth Avenue property is former Boston University housing that Northeastern currently leases. Third-year English and psychology major Crystal Lau said everyone she knows there is either an N.U.in or exchange student. It consists of two-person studio apartments and three-person apartments with single rooms.

Students who live there are not required to have a meal plan like first-years who live on-campus. To aid in the 40-minute public-transit commute, which requires one transfer, they receive an unlimited T pass for each semester. In addition, a Northeastern shuttle leaves Commonwealth seven times daily to bring students to campus.

Lau, an exchange student from Hong Kong, takes the shuttle to campus in the morning, but said there aren’t always enough seats, and sometimes drivers leave before the scheduled departure time.

Lau was originally placed into housing at the Midtown Hotel on Huntington Avenue. She said it looked “sketchy” at first, but she liked the location near campus. After living there for about a week, Lau and her roommate were told they had to leave and would be put in permanent housing on Commonwealth Avenue.

“I wasn’t super happy about it at first because I’d settled into Midtown,” Lau said. “Once you unpack everything, you don’t want to put it all back. It’s literally so far off campus, it kind of feels like they didn’t want to deal with us so just sent us off far, far away.”

Lau said she was upset at first, but recognizes that living in Commonwealth has its upsides, such as having her own kitchen. Lau said she made the situation work, but if the housing department told her a place on campus opened up, she would definitely move.

Carolonza found alternative housing on her own before she even arrived on campus from N.U.in. She didn’t want to live too far from campus because of safety concerns, and she thought it would be more difficult to make friends, so she contacted the housing office to see what her options were.

They allowed her to drop her housing deposit, so she and her roommates were able to find off-campus housing on Worcester Street, a 10 to 15-minute walk from campus, for less money than they would have paid for Commonwealth.

Carolonza said she is very happy with her decision but feels lucky she was able to find good off-campus housing on such a short notice. She said she thinks students should have been made aware they could be placed in housing far away from campus when they applied for apartment-style housing.

“We the students have the right to be informed and, for the tuition being paid, a right to not submit to a 50-minute walk to campus,” Carolonza said.

Sabrina Rigby, a first-year media and screen studies and political science combined major, was assigned to live in Commonwealth. She participated in N.U.in in Prague and remembers feeling frustrated and helpless when she found out.

“I was livid,” Rigby said. “That night that I found out, a bunch of us stayed up complaining about it until like 2 a.m. We were just like, ‘There has to be a way out of it. We have to be able to do something.’ We felt so powerless and so pissed off.”

The day after she found out about her housing, Rigby’s parent contacted the housing office. The day before coming to the Boston campus, Rigby found out she would eventually be placed in on-campus housing, but didn’t know when or to where she would move. Rigby lived in Commonwealth for more than a week before moving into to a traditional freshman dorm.

Rigby said she did not like living in Commonwealth because she had to wake up at 6 a.m. to get to campus on time, then couldn’t leave until late in the evening and wasn’t able to go home in between classes. She said she also felt concerned for her safety taking the T home alone at night.

“If you could pick up Comm Ave. and bring it over closer to Northeastern within a decent walking distance, I would have been like, ‘I’m going to stay here. This is great.’ It was really the location,” Rigby said.

Of eight students from the N.U.in Prague program that were placed in Commonwealth, all have since moved to on-campus housing. Rigby said Northeastern should stop leasing housing that isn’t within walking distance from campus.

“You can’t call it on-campus housing, and you shouldn’t call it on-campus housing if I literally could have gone to BU so much faster,” Rigby said. “Maybe it’s cheaper, but at the end of the day, that’s definitely not worth it, especially considering how much stress that puts on the housing department.”