Thanks to all for the advice. I feel reassured that dorm life won’t be as crazy as I’ve been led to believe. I’m still not sure if I’m more afraid of being a loner or using a common bathroom, though. 
Dorms are awesome. I wish I had stayed in mine more than a year. It might have kept me out of trouble.
Did I miss the memo outlining why they are unacceptable now? My high school, college, college fraternity, and health club (until recently) all had communal showers.
Count me as a dissenter for apartments. I wanted desperately to like dorm life. I even chose my university in part because it required first year students to live on campus and really tried to foster a sense of community. I lived in beautiful on-campus apartments in a school with a culture that nearly perfectly suited me.
And damned if my living situation wasn’t miserable for the two years I was on campus. I was forced to live with messy, loud, frustrating people who I would have never voluntarily hung out with, much less shared space with. We had some control over who we lived with, but not that much control. My housemates included vegans who frowned on my food purchases, engaged skanks who’d lock the door for hours to be with their cheat-of-the-day, drug dealers, non-stop phone yellers, passive aggressive freaks, SCA geeks leaving sharp little hoops of chain mail everywhere, smelly footed hippies, good Samaritans that would invite the homeless over to sleep on our living room floors and steal our stuff, and one guy who I was genuinely concerned was poisoning my food. That guy was actually really scary.
Yeah, it was fun being around a lot of people my age, but as it turns out, like most situation the majority of those people were jerks. Imagine living with your co-workers. Although I’m not a loner, I’m also not a social butterfly, and I’d have preferred to have more time to spend with my few close friends than with a bunch of people I didn’t like much. Unfortunately, dorm life makes having real close friendships more difficult than having handfuls of fleeting ones.
I never had room to pursue my hobbies. Paintings got knocked over while drying in communal spaces. Elaborate cooking (one of my favorite hobbies) was an impossibility because nobody took responsibility for keeping the kitchen usable. Food was stolen from refrigerator shelves. Passions and Star Trek blared forth at all hours from the front-room televisions, despite being a “television free household”.
But most of all, I hated the sense that the dorm wasn’t really your home. We had quarterly cleaning inspections and were kicked out over breaks. And if, for example, your roommate moved out, they could place another person there at any time. We had a list a page long of items we were and were not allowed to have. You could be moved in to a different room at any time for no reason. It felt like staying in a hotel, for years straight. I longed desperately for a place that was “home” for reals. A place I could count on. A place that didn’t distribute a sheet before winter break stating how much you’d be fined for staying extra days.
And there is just this huge sense of being watched. Throw a get together? Expect authorities to knock on the door and see who all is there and haul you in god forbid there is alcohol and someone underaged. One of my friends got in trouble with the school because of a painting he hung on his wall that was glimsped through the window by a passing security guard- in other words, they peek in your windows.
In my third year I moved to an apartment and was happy as a clam. I loved my apartment, I was in a hip downtown area and could walk to anything I could ever need- and it didn’t shut down on weekends like campus did. I had space to do what I wanted and had a lot of fun fixing up my apartment to look nice. I could cook and have friends over whenever I wanted. People could even stay for a weeks if I wanted them to. And if I wanted to spend Friday night surfing the Internet or working on my knitting, nobody made fun of me. I got a wonderful pet. I still met plenty of people, but I didn’t have to take them home with me.
And it was sooo much cheaper. Really look at those numbers they are charging for the dorms. At my school, a meal plan wasn’t much cheaper than just going to cheapish restaurants- and the food was much worse. For the prices I was paying to stay in a godforsaken jail cell sized triple occupancy room (I signed up for a single, but they ran out and figured a triple was an okay substitute- see above for more about “complete lack of control”) was the same I paid to share a nice one-bedroom apartment by the beach with the room mate of my choice.
So, even sven, I take it dorm life didn’t agree with you?
Joking aside, thanks for the input. Some of the things you mentioned - room checks, being kicked out during breaks - are things that I’m pretty sure aren’t applicable to the dorms I’m currently considering. My only worry is that since undergrad students will also be using the same dorms, I’ll be rubbing elbows with people that I wouldn’t normally want to rub any part of my anatomy with - especially if I end up staying in a double room.