College dorm life...did I miss out?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I lived on campus for a semester at my first college. I dropped at the end of the semester and transferred to where I am now. I moved into an apartment then, so I didn’t live on campus any more, but I don’t feel I missed anything. I didn’t mind living on campus, but I paid for much of school at this college by myself, so I needed to save the money.

A lot of people I met thought it would mean there was less reason to be involved on campus if you didn’t live there, but I had friends who did and spent a lot of time there anyway. I still was active in several clubs, and am still in one club and a fraternity. My wife was in three or four clubs and a sorority and didn’t live on campus after her first year (IIRC). If it works, it works. The only thing I feel I missed out on was a lack of privacy and spending more money than I needed to.

Brendon Small

22

I really miss dorm life. I mean really, really miss it. I lived it for one glorious semester, before my dad started refusing to pay for any of my educational expenses. I was too stupid and ignorant then to figure out a way to pay for it myself. And man, am I kicking myself now. Now that I’m going to transfer back to a four-year university, I might as well buy a one-way ticket to dweebsville if I go back to a dorm.

Of course, everyone will love me when it’s time for a beer run (since I’ll be on the verge of 22 at that point), but I’d still most likely be a loser. Unless I were an RA, which would kind of kill the point anyway.

23

I think you missed out some because of the social factor. My best friend lived in my dorm - we met 10 years ago.

24

I have a clue did you miss this sentence:

What I didn’t add was that I was the only techie in a dorm full of artsy-craftsies for three endless years with no escape. You try it.

And this is not a thread about encouraging someone to “yeh man stay in the dorm its great” It’s about a guy who’s feeling like he missed something because he didn’t stay in a dorm. So all you folks raving about your ginormously great experiences are salting the wound.

I was just trying to give a different but true viewpoint.

And I can also say from true experience that being totally broke while living in the dorm with others not sharing your condition is not a whole lot of fun either.

25

This is such a ridiculous statement I couldn’t come up with a good way to answer it, so I’ll just do a list:

(1) It’s a preposterous notion that you were the lone techie in a sea of artsy-craftsies for 9 semesters.

(2) Techies and artsy-craftsies aren’t like Jews and Nazi’s, they can be friends.

(3) I can’t even begin to fathom the logical path from “I’m a techie and you’re artsy-crafty” to “I’m going to make your life miserable and try to make you leave”.

(4) The whole point of going to college is to meet people with different viewpoints and expand your horizons.

Trust me you’ve provided a perfect counter point to everyone’s positive experiences. Incubus and everyone else could have had the misfortune of getting you as a roommate. When I went to college I was looking to meet new people and make new friends. I can’t imagine how awful it would have been to draw you as a roommate.

26

From what I’ve heard from friends who went to UCSC, the dorms are pretty good.

For me, my dorm experience was kind of “meh”.

I transferred from a Los Angeles community college to the University of Utah when I was 23. Most people in the dorms were 18, which sometimes (not always) made it kind of awkward. Even most other transfer students were 20 or so.

While I enjoyed the dorm life to a degree, and it was great for meeting people…the absolute worst part about my dorm experience was the student cafeteria food.

It was HORRID.

So yeah…I’m green with envy too, because your girlfriend is likely to have far more edible food than the slop I had to choke down for a year. Or…maybe I’m just green from the disgusting memories of that place. :stuck_out_tongue:

27

Depends on what type of person you are. My freshman dorm wasn’t real social with each other. Most had friends from other halls that they hung out with. The RAs did their thing together, but as a group we really didn’t do much. In fact we were given money and our RA asked what we wanted to spend it on nobody suggested anything. With 3 weeks left in the semester he said screw it and just bought everyone pizza.

My sister’s dorm on the other hand was really social. They ended up spending a second year in their dorm and now, though she lives in an apartment, she lives with the same people she was rooming with in the dorm.

28

Hey, I had fifteen roommates in six months.

The first nine barely count - I was in temp housing - ten girls in a boy’s lounge.

The next two were BFFs (Best Friends Forever) from high school. It was a triple. Their third BFF got pregnant and didn’t come…and I got stuck in that room. We didn’t hit it off (I don’t know if anyone could, they were pretty bitter about their lack of the perfect year the three of them were going to have). One afternoon I returned from class to discover they’d forged my name on a transfer, packed up my stuff, changed the locks and left my crap in the hall (where much of it got stolen). And a note that told me who where my new roommates were.

My new roommates lasted ten minutes - they’d already made a trade for someone else (for which I was grateful, two smokers). So I pushed my crap to the third room. I was beginning to feel like the third string pitcher in a complicated baseball trade.

Where I spent the rest of the year living with two girls I got along fine with. Not best friends, but comfy roommates.

I then transferred to the University of Minnesota which is a commuter college and lived in apartments.

It wasn’t great, but dorm life is a little like summer sleep away camp - its a right of passage that you might not enjoy when you are there (or ever enjoy) but I can see how if you didn’t get to do it you’d miss it.

29

Sad but true. Think the early 70’s. I know this is hard for you to imagine. No coed dorms. No other women in your program. Required to live in the locked dorms with men (boys) only allowed to visit on Sunday’s from 12pm-2pm. I know it’s beyond your ken but that’s the way it was.

Which probably doesn’t really address Incubus’s question. More to the point; my daughter loved living on campus and did so for 4 years, my son hated it and moved off campus after two years. It really depends on what kind of person you are. Some people love it and some people hate it. To get back to the reality of your situation: envy of some one elses better opportunities is human, but anticipating the future and knowing you did the best you could with what you had is even better.

Look to the future and be happy for your girl friend’s opportunities. I still say you did good.

30

Your college experience is what it is. You didn’t necessarily miss out if you are happy with how things turned out. There’s a lot of boredom and suckage in college, which we tend to forget as years go by. But I lived in a dorm, initially didn’t enjoy it much, but ultimately reflect on it as the best decision I made as a 18 to 22 year old.

I am a pretty private person. I chose my dorm because it had en suite bathrooms - no way in hell was I going to do the big communal shower/shitter thing. I also went to college in my hometown, so people were acting like I was crazy… “Save your money” and so on.

I had a pretty bad roommate, he was sheltered and a geek and tried to live it up like crazy. He went to class for the first six weeks, then just stopped going. Surprise surprise, he flunked out. But a decent guy. I was the only Black kid on my floor, probably one of a handful in the building. I definitely stood out and I didn’t want to. When rush started it got worse because we had frat daddies all over the building starting shit. But I had a nice RA who invited me to stuff. I kind of got the hang of things and became more social. Then my RA told me about the perks of the job…

…and I became an RA. My best college friends were my fellow RAs - I’ve been a groomsman or best man in two weddings, and we pretty much e-mail once a week or so. I got to live by myself for four years, but I had friends at the ready all the time. I wasn’t super social as an RA but I did a good job and the students respected me.

Five years later I graduated as one of 12 distinguished grads in my college for my academics and service in school. It started with living in the dorm and getting to know the pulse of what was happening on campus. When you live off campus, like my HS friends did, you just want to go home after a long day. When you’re rested up, you’re not going to get in your car and find parking and hang out in dorms. But you can do that on campus. Someone’s always up, there’s always a party/philosophical discussion/video game tournament going on.

I’ll also point out that of all of my HS friends, whom I consider to be equally smart as me, only two of the six finished in a reasonable amount of time. The others either flunked out and had to re-enroll, or stopped out for a long time. When I was doing poorly in school I had easy access to tutors, libraries, and study groups. Not so much for my friends.

The funny thing is that I’m a professor at my old college and my office is literally a block away from my old dorm. I’ve met a couple of the RAs there and they have the same bond we did 15 years ago. It definitely is a financial burden if money is tight, but the RA job can make it affordable and give you the life of someone a few rungs up on the socioeconomic scale. (My first year, we were given the most expensive rooms in the hall because the cheap ones were the fast sellers. So I had a penthouse view of downtown Austin with the capitol… pretty cool stuff!)

Apartment life has some of these features, but most college student apartments are really dirty - we had minimal maid service who at least cleaned your toilet and emptied your trash, which every college student has the ability to ignore until hellacious funk forces you to handle it - and unless you can afford to live near campus, you’re pretty disconnected from campus life as well. In the dorms you typically get the most diversity - kids from small towns, kids in different majors, different religions, ethnicities, parts of the country and world. I always liked it when I worked around the holidays and the kids from far away and overseas were typically still around. I got to know them a bit and experience Christmastime or New Year’s as a pretty normal time from their perspective.

31

I miss dorm life in that nostalgic way that people always miss periods in their lives that were not really that great but had memorable moments. I lived in the “alternative community” dorm which basically meant that everyone there was either an indie kid or a hippie. I always alternated between, “man, these hipster motherfuckers are all so irritating,” and “man, this argyle vest looks GREAT on me. Boy, am I stoned. It’s such a nice night. I’m going to go flirt with that Asian girl.”

I came out of high school as a more or less “popular,” jock-ish, future frat guy type, but I only hung with that crowd because I lacked genuine confidence and thought that the theater kids (who I secretly wanted to be) were all “fags” because of social conditioning. I was really kind of a closet hipster all along. When I got to this hipster dorm filled with Elliot Smith fans and gay guys, I had a week or two of not fitting in, and then I started getting high with these people and listening to their music and all of a sudden was like, “this is ME! I love living here! I love the fact that there’s a guy sitting here playing a cello on the veranda, just for the hell of it!” I’d go out to ethnic restaurants with people, have late night discussions about philosophical shit, listen to Of Montreal and Kings of Convenience and admire all those beautiful indie-rock chicks with vintage road bikes and weird dresses, and then go to my classes and see all the people with white baseball caps turned backwards/sideways, popped collars, gym shorts, and guys yelling “fag!” and talking about sports betting during class - - - and I’d think, “THANK JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY THAT I LIVE IN AN ALTERNATIVE COMMUNITY!”

But there were plenty of times when my head would get so big that I’d think that I was even hipper than all the other hipsters and that they were all just assholes who didn’t really understand anything, etc etc. And there would be nights when I just wished I was sleeping in my bed at my parents’ house.

So it varied. But yeah, I guess I miss it, albeit through the old rose-colored glasses.

32

I transferred to a four year university from a junior college, so I didn’t get the “college life” thing for the first couple of years either. I opted for the dorms for the first semester for practical reasons; it’s hard to do apartment hunting from over 400 miles away. Some of the hand-holding rules around dorm life sucked for me because I’d been living mostly on my own for a few years already. For instance, you had to be on a meal plan for your first two semesters — no exceptions, no matter what — probably so that freshmen who had never been away from home before wouldn’t blow their food budget on hookers and pot, or something.

Like any kind of communal living, things were pretty cliquey sometimes. I transferred in halfway through the year and was about 3 years older than everyone, which didn’t help anything. Even worse, I was paying for school myself and didn’t have mommy and daddy to depend on, so I was actually interested in studying. I did make friends and get invited to things that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about, but I was reasonably outgoing by that time, having gotten over most of my prior shyness. I stayed out of most of the drama partly because I was a bit of an outsider, but there was plenty of drama around.

If it was your first year in the dorms, you had to have a double. Again, probably so Emily McEmo and Dan Depressive wouldn’t slit their wrists from feeling isolated. Instead, they’d be encouraged to turn those feelings outward, toward homicide. My roommate was a budding alcoholic whose lawyer father and doctor mother pretty much guaranteed him funding as long as he didn’t do anything too egregious. He and his other frat-boyish buddies got drunk and loud on a regular basis, during the week, in the middle of the day, whenever. The dorm rooms were slightly bigger than a prison cell, and sharing a room with someone I liked would have been a pain. With this guy, it was torture.

One thing that dorms definitely help with is making various friends and possibly hooking up with chicks/dudes. More social functions and small groups push you into close proximity. Unfortunately, there are some complicated social dynamics related to relationships started under those circumstances. It mostly ends up being short-term and then drama ensues. I never slept with anyone in my dorm, but did meet a few young ladies from other dorms through women in my dorm.

You also meet people you wouldn’t otherwise know because a lot of colleges don’t segregate dorms by declared major. If you only met people in your areas of study, you’d probably have a lot smaller pool of acquaintances to start with. On the other hand, many of them are people you don’t click with either. I only maintained contact with one person I met while I was in the dorms, and lost track of him soon after I graduated. He did help get me laid a couple of times though. :smiley: Many lessons can be learned from a man with few inhibitions.

I moved out after the first semester and got a room in a house near campus. Most of the guys I was roommates with at that place were much better to live with than the shithead in the dorm, and I didn’t have to share a room. I was a lot happier out of the dorms than in. Two of the guys I shared the house with the longest came to my wedding, and I invited a third who wasn’t able to make it. I had maintained contact with them for over 5 years after graduation. That gives you an indication of how good the ties were between us.

33

I had a blast living in dorms.

I had great friends.

Drank beer.

Smoked pot.

Watched sports (we always used to get PPV fights in the dorms).

Played frisbee and hackysack.

Made tons of beating off jokes.

Got exposed to tons of bands.

Had some great parties.

Got laid just by virtue of being drunk, and in proximity to drunk girls.

But, I was 18/19. As awesome as that sounds, it can get tiriing. To wit,

My roommate pissed on my cassette tapes.

You’re sleeping right next to some other dude, or in a bunk.

You lose a lot of freedom.

The bathrooms can be gross.

Sometimes you need to take shit from an RA (an overgrown hall monitor).

You need to be quiet at certain hours.

So, living in a dorm can suck, but I still consider it vital to the college experience, and it’s worth going into debt over, and not living with mother.

34

Today, every single one of my best friends I met by living in the dorms with them for a year. I think it is one of the very best ways to meet new people and make long-lasting friends. My life would be considerably poorer if I had not lived in the dorms, traditional suckiness notwithstanding. I even met my first “official” lover there.

I mean, where else but in the dorms can you simply walk the halls and hear all kinds of different music and experience all kinds of interesting people first-hand expressing themselves in a relaxed, friendly environment?

I strongly recommend dorm life for a while.

35

Non-parental living (be it dorms or off-campus) is probably a good idea the first semester or two, because it does force you to take care of yourself a bit more.

I’m now in my third year and sixth semester living in dorms. I do so because A) a lack of transportation to and from campus and B) my choice is live in the dorms and the parents will pay, or get someplace in town and a second job to go with it to pay for living costs. And in my opinion, dorms suck. I hate the noise, I hate the general grime, I hate public bathrooms, I hate having one shower for eight people, I hate the expectation that every hour is social hour. I hate that if you want to hang out with someone, it’s either in an entirely public place (commons) or your bedroom. Dorms absolutely suck.

Plus, my college A) rips us off to begin with for housing costs and B) requires on-campus students to purchase at least a 14 meal/week plan, which is insanely overpriced ($6.95/meal!), to say nothing of the ‘quality’ of food.

36

I lived in a dorm for a semester and didn’t really care one way or the other. I left school, went out on my own, got a job, had an apartment, etc. Then when I went back to school the idea of living in a dorm again just horrified me, so I got an exemption and lived off-campus.

In retrospect, that might not have been the best decision since I was isolated from campus life. But I also became extremely independent and I can handle alone time better than anyone I know.

37

Dorms are a good way to transition from one’s parents’ house to living on one’s own. I doubt that most eighteen-year-olds are prepared to live on their own, let alone to do so on top of going through the first year of college. For that reason, my alma mater (and other schools do as well I think) require freshmen to live in dorms unless your family is so close that you can live at home.

38

I found that living in a dorm was a great halfway house between living at home and really living on my own in an apartment. You have to wake yourself up, but you don’t have to worry about food or utilities or fixing anything.

I loved living in a dorm. I lived in an odd one designed by a famous Finnish architect, which had mostly singles but partitioned floors which build communities. Most of the people in our area freshman year went through all four years together. We ate together, went to the movies together, played cards together, and did various hacks together.

Another advantage is that in a dorm you’ve got people you can work on problem sets with, at least in the early years when everyone is taking the same basic classes.

However, I can’t blame someone who can live at home for free for doing so. But I know I wouldn’t have built so many friendships, and taken part in so many activities at home.

How do people feel about a few years in a dorm and then an apartment? Most UCs force that, and my daughter at Maryland says they are kicking seniors out. She’ll get to stay because she’s an RA now. That seems like a good compromise if you are fed up with dorms.

39

Personally, I loved living in a dorm. Did it for two years, then moved out with roommates. Never lived with fewer than two roommates in my college years and it was great. Then again, I’m pretty laid-back and it takes effort not to get along with me.

Some people prefer to live by themselves and hate the idea of having a roommate. I am not one of these people. I do sometimes miss dorm life, absolutely nothing about it sucked from my perspective at the time. Not sure I would do it right now, but during those years, it was exactly the type of social and intellectual stimulation I needed. It fostered great friendships, creative growth, late-night-talks-with-almost-strangers. Some of those talks and 1 a.m. arguments over politics or religion or whatnot have shaped what I am today.

40

Some of these gripes I can identify with, and some I can’t.

NinjaChick hates noise, grime, public bathrooms, sharing the shower, and the expectation that every hour is social hour. That “social hour all the time” thing, I loved when I was in the dorm–it’s just a matter of personal preference. A couple guys on our floor weren’t social butterflies, but they kept to themselves and the rest of us left them alone. Except for one dude. He just sat on his computer and played World of Warcraft all day and all night–never even went to class. He drove his roommate up the wall because Roomie would have buddies over and try to have a grand old time while Mr. Awkward was drooling in front of his computer screen. I don’t get why that bugged him so much, but whatever. Mr. Awkward moved out pretty quick and it wasn’t really an issue.

Sharing the shower? Never been a big deal to me, I guess. But then, I’ve been in boot camp, too.

Public bathrooms? Yeah, that sucked. There were a lot of times when my squeamish RA would beg and plead for me to flush a toilet that someone else had left some horrifying experiment in. I didn’t mind that much–we struck a deal: I had emergency toilet-flusher duties, and in exchange he was to do everything in his power to keep me from getting written up for drugs or alcohol. Sure enough, he saved my ass when another RA in the building saw me stumbling around drunk.

Then there were the drunk girls who tried to use our urinals. Not a pretty sight, but didn’t end up being that big a deal.

General grime wasn’t really a problem in common areas, other than the bathroom of course, but it wasn’t unbearable there.

Noise? Yeah, that got to be an issue. One guy would blast Metallica or Beethoven at ear-splitting volume for entire weekends with the door open–the guy straight across from my room, coincidentally–for his third straight year there and wonder why he wasn’t an RA yet. But we had specified quiet hours, and he respected them. One of my three closest friends at the school–two of whom I’d met right there on my floor of the dorm hall–got written up once for violating our RA’s Only Way To Piss Him Off: keeping him up by blasting the bass at night. Needless to say, the nocturnal sound system exhibition got put to a halt fast.

Food? We had a meal plan, but it wasn’t mandatory. And it was actually just a card with a certain amount of money on it, which you could use at any restaurant on campus plus Domino’s and Papa John’s off-campus. That includes about 10 restaurants run by the school, which were pretty cheap and healthy, plus McDonald’s, another Domino’s, Pick Up Stix, and a few other fast food favorites. And one of the school restaurants served pretty good (and cheap) Sonoran-style Mexican food. That’s the University of Arizona, BTW.

That’s what I loved. I think I might go back to a dorm when I transfer to a four-year institution again (probably a UC somewhere).