I’m going off to college at UT Austin next year and could use some help. I can try to get a dorm on campus or an apartment that is (hopefully) nearby. The cost of each is about the same according to UT’s website. Either one would be fine with me, I think, but I don’t have much experience on this. Any advice from former or current college Dopers would be very much appreciated (especially UT alumni).
Thanks in advance.
Remember that if you opt for the apartment you’ll have to pay for utilities too, which are included in the cost of the dorm. Also, you won’t be as close to stuff like the library and cafeteria, and you’ll have to get up earlier in the am so you can make it to class on time.
I lived in the dorm for two and a half years while I was in college, then rented a house with two roommates for the next year and a half. I didn’t mind living in the dorm; I had good roommates, and there was always someone available for study help and the occasional midnight doughnut run. After I got a little older and deeper into my nursing classes, the house was better because it was quieter and studying was easier there.
My advice would be to try the dorm for a year. You’re almost guaranteed to meet lots of people that way, and some of them could turn out to be potential roommates if you decide to get an apartment later on and need to share the rent. Hope this helps!
What she said. Dorm life, to me, is a part of the college experience which shouldn’t be missed. The friends that I still have from college are from the dorms at UMd and OSU. And aside from the convenient location factor, you may want to consider the probability that most of the affordable apartments around campus will be run-down and cheap. And you’ll have to deal with a landlord, which can be a huge pain in the ass. I’ve had bad roommates, but the good ones and the friends I made in the dorms more than make up for the bad experiences. And remember, there’ll always be time to move out if you don’t like it.
Pick the dorm!!
I agree with everything everybody above posted–a dorm is an experience, and this is the only time to do it.
Also, keep in mind that while the cost of an apartment and the cost of a dorm are the same, you CAN get financial aid to apply to your housing in a dorm, but I don’t think you can use financial aid you get towards an off-campus apartment. So living in a dorm may be way cheaper for you, if you rely a lot on financial aid (which I do, and I always go the dorm route, since its cost is lower for me in terms of out-of-pocket costs). Plus, if your roommate drops out of school after a few weeks, you don’t get stuck paying the rent all by yourself. And there’s usually a residence life staff to help you out, also–if your roommate is a complete jerk, you can be moved and so on.
I’ll echo the other posters and say live in the dorms–at least for the first year. I speak from experience–I lived at home my freshman year. I still don’t feel like I have my own group of friends. That’s not to say I don’t have friends (though it feels like that sometimes), but I seem to have looser affiliations. You wouldn’t believe how many people are still tight with people they met in the dorms their freshman year.
Depending on how your campus is, I’d live in the dorms your sophomore year. Where I go to school, it’s kinda uncool to stay in the dorms any longer than that.
Apartments do have hidden expenses. There’s all the things you don’t think of having to buy–shower curtain, rings to hold the shower curtain, silverware holders, trash cans, mops, brooms, toilet brushes, etc. And then the first time you get toothpaste on the mirror, you’ll realize you don’t have Windex. There’s also the hassles of dealing with landlords. Plus, you’ll have to cook for yourself.
But that said–apartments do give you a wonderful sense of freedom. But you’ll have that a lot your freshman year, anyway. Put of the responsibility while you can and have fun in the dorms.
Not to be contrary, but I went to school at UT and lived off-campus the entire time. For me, it was cheaper. My first year my roommates and I rented a little 3 bedroom house on Salado Street (just west of the campus) for $175/month. That street had several such houses, obviously built to rent to students (where else do you find one bedroom 350 sq. ft. houses?). The real estate around the campus has been developed in recent years and is probably pricier now. Riverside was a popular student area, as was Enfield.
As far as social interactions went, within my first year I met many folks who did live in the dorms, and thus met their dorm friends. Not to mention the fact that the neighborhoods surrounding the campus were filled with students. And having an off-campus domicile was a popular thing.
To be fair, I’ll add that I worked for several years after high school, before I went to college, and I probably wouldn’t have really enjoyed living with a bunch of 18 year olds. Off the top of my head, though, I can’t think of anyone who stayed in the dorms past their first year.
YMMV. Good luck, and Hook’em 'Horns!
I agree. While you will get sick of the dorms and there are many bad things about them, you would do yourself a horrible disservice not to experience dorm life. Socially speaking, dorm life is great. it makes the transition to college MUCH easier. The people I met and lived with in the dorm are people that are still some of my closest friends today. Don’t get me wrong, I knew and know people who really hated the dorms(mostly due to badly matched roomates) but for the most part they’re great for that first year or two. I roomed blind and my freshman year roomate and I still hang out 5 years later. In fact, we’re heading out to the pub together for an early St. Patricks celebration tonite…
Definitely go with the dorms. They are generally closer and more convenient. It’s easier to meet people. And chances are you’ll have a really fast internet connection (if your univesity is on the ball). And they are just a lot of fun.
To be the voice of dissent, I hated every minute in the dorms.
I couldn’t afford a single, and I ended up in triples for my two years on campus. I am an only child and going from having a house with just my mom and I to sharing a room with two strangers was terrible. Add to that that all my roommates were Satan, and not in a good way. I hate every single on of them. I cannot emphasize enough how evil they were. It got so bad that I would avoid going to my house for more than a week straight because I couldn’t stand to be around them.
I hated the feeling of impermanence in the dorms. None of the furniture is yours. You don’t have your own bathroom that you can keep up to your own cleanliness standards (and that you can, say, comfortably puke in when you’ve had too much to drink). Or a bathtub to soak in. You don’t have anywhere to put guests when they come to visit. There are authority figures prowling around trying to catch you drinking or being too loud or having too many people over or somehow violating the rules. I didn’t even do that much that would get me in trouble, but I couldn’t stand the idea that there were people whos job it was to look in on your life. The houseing office can move people in and out of rooms at will- you can find yourself suddenly reassigned, or have extra roomates added to your room, or otherwise have your situation screwed up. It just never felt like home. I always felt that I was living just one step above living out of a suitcase.
Add to that the difficulty of finding a place to be alone with your boyfriend when you live with a million people. Lots of fun there. There are no secrets in dorms and there is no such thing as privacy. Even the chance to snuggle up in bed alone and read a good book is a rare luxery.
And then there was the fact that my campus was pretty isolated and it was a bit difficult to get to town. On weekends everything was closed. I felt so out of touch with anything but school. I could never get away.
Moving off campus was the best thing I ever did. I’ve got a sunny little beach cottage that I share with my best friend. I can have people over whenever I want, but I can also have privacy. I don’t have strange roomates to fight with. I have personal space. I have my own dishes and furniture and it really feels like I have a home, not just a place to stay. I can put up a Christmas tree. I live in a pretty happening part of town, and there are restraunts and bars and beaches and an amusment park and coffee shops and all kinds of wonderful things to keep me busy. It is nice to actually go to school- as in wake up, take a shower, get dressed and go there- as opposed to rolling out of bed and trudgeing to class in my PJs and never feeling like I am 100% in class or 100% at home. I can cook good food and not have to spend a fortune on bad dorm food. I have room for all my stuff. I have a bathtub and I never have to wait to use it. It is soooooooo wonderful.
Dorms suck, but try 'em for a year so that you know the suck.
I did two years in the dorms.
The first was okay, even fun at times. But even sven has the gist of it, you are never home, you are never at school, you are a floating mote of people crap just like very other floating mote of people crap on campus. Its not a real life.
Its an experiance that you should know, but its not one of the better in life.
Then you move out and you re-discover what joys and wonders there are in real life off campus! People do indded see trees, children and animals on a daily basis off campus. (And in my experiance off campus is far, far cheaper than dorms, whatever the literature says.)
Oh, and roomates will always suck. Roll with it, I mived in with what I thought was my most stable and responsible friend, and two weeks ago he attacked me and I got to send him to therapy. Life goes on.
The dorms are a great way to meet people and get established, but there are major drawbacks. You might think about some of the student communities off of Riverside Dr. (University Commons, Jefferson something or other and Melrose Place- which has it’s own shuttle bus). You will have your own room, a bathroom you only share with a couple of people, a kitchen (SO much better than the UT meal plans) and a stop on the UT shuttle right outside your door.
At the student communities, you have your own lease also, so you don’t have to worry about some slacker roommate costing you rent and causing headaches.
And all due respect to my boy Ringo over there, but he was going to UT in the dark ages! 
Rent on a one bedroom hovers around $500/month, and the dorms work out to be about the same (unless you opt for the San Jacinto dorm, I think it is about $550). But Nightingale makes a good point about extra expenses.
Feel free to email me (it’s in my profile) if there’s anything specific you want to know about UT.
I loved the dorms, lived in them for four years. Of course, Milligan College’s honors dorms were pretty nice, or I might have changed my mind after a few years.
I felt like I was part of the college community in a way that off-campus students weren’t. Sure, there were minor discomforts, but it was nice to be surrounded by friends day and night. If you were bored, you just wandered down the hallway until you found a party or a card game or a lively conversation.
I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
It was also more convenient and cheaper- there are a lot of unexpected extra costs in an apartment, and when you live on campus, you don’t have to move as far to get to class- some mornings, that extra ten minutes of sleep can be all-important.
Of course, I went to a very small college, with a very close-knit community, and things might be different at a large university.
There are apartments (like the one I’m in now) that don’t charge for utilities. Rent’s just a tad more expensive that it would be otherwise, but it’s worth it.
There is nothing fun about dorm life. Most dorms are no bigger than a damn closet. If you’re a slob like I am, it’s even smaller. Plus, it SUCKS having to share a bathroom with a million other people. Sure, you can find those fancy suite dorms where you end up sharing a toliet with only three people, but you’ll be competing against well-deserving upper classmen for those spots.
People are loud and nasty in dorms. They play their music ridicuously loud at 2:00 AM when you have a physics test the next morning. They run up and down the halls, giggling like drunken fools. They set the fire alarms. They leave puke puddles in the public shower. They pee on the toliet seats. Ugh.
If I had to do it all over again, I would have ditched the two years that I spent in the dorm and go straight to apartment-living. Even if it ends up costing more, it’s still better IMHO.
The best thing is not having to move out come summertime and move back in when school starts up again. This might not seem like a big deal, but do you know how much crap one accumulates during the course of a school year? A whole lot!
I say do a one-year stint in the dorms just so you get your fullest taste of campus life. Then, hook up with someone and go in together for an apartment. It’s great fun being an independent college student, yessiree! Have fun in all of your adventures.
It depends on a lot of factors.
First of all, how good are the dorms? If you have closets for dorm rooms you may want to wait until you’re an upper classman.
Secondly, how good are the apartments and what is the availability? In some university towns apartments are expensive and scarce, so you’re better off staying in the dorms.
If you can’t go there to take a look at the potential accomodations personally it should be better if you spend the first year in the dorms. They shouldn’t be too bad.
I myself spent my undergrad years on campus and never had any problems. Sure, the dorms were relatively good even for froshes, and we had RAs that acutally did their job.
When I went to university (Waterloo, early 1980s), first-year students were required to live in one of the residences, at least for the first term. (Note to Americans: Canadians do NOT call them ‘dorms’.) Somehow I managed to get a double room in Village One, which was mostly upper-year students. Most of my classmates were in the anthill known as Village Two, which was further from the centre of campus.
Residence life had its interesting times.
There was the time I returned from the winter holidays, accompanied by my father, and opened the door of my room to discover every square centimetre of my room covered with porn pictures by my departing first-term roommate. (“Dad? Dad! I can explain…!”)
This had freaked my new second-term roommate, who had moved in a few days before I returned, and knew nothing of me other than the fact that I apparently liked my walls papered with porn.
Many nights when I wanted to get to sleep, I had no alternatives but to listen to my choice of music coming from adjoining rooms and other floors.
This second-term roomie was a doper, er, I mean, ‘toker’ (blush), and would fill his room and mine with a tokey fog. It would billow out when I opened the door. I therefore took to sleeping at the studio, or at other peoples’ apartments.
Ah yes, the studio. I was taking architecture, and this was where we drew. Everyone got a large desk and a metal lockbox. The building was open 24/7, and had showers. Within weeks of starting the program, we were spending late evenings there. Soon we spent all night there. People started to bring in stereos and hotplates and microwave ovens. One person had a wardrobe. Someone built a bed in an area of unused shelving. Plants appeared. Many people never saw their rooms in residence for weeks on end.
At the end of first year, two friends and I decided to get an apartment.
Other than the university’s own Married Students’ Apartments, there was only one actual apartment *building[/] within convenient walking distance of the campus. This apartment building was known to everyone as Cockroach Towers, and charged $600 per month for a two-bedroom apartment. This was approximately 1.5 times the normal rate for such an apartment in that time and place.
Many people preferred to rent houses nearby, even though this required four or five students and greater coordination. Some preferred to find apartments further from the university, and live with the necessities of using the bus or operating a car and paying insurance and parking.
Crud. I meant to preview and I posted. sigh
Anyway, apartment life had advantages for us: much more room for us and our stuff; our own food instead of the Institutional Food Service with its mystery “meat” and scrambled “eggs”; greater privacy for guests and friends.
My roommate was able to arrange a romatic beach holiday for himself and his girlfriend by installing beach sand, an inflatable palm tree, and other accessories on a tarp in his room, and choosing a weekend when we other residents were away.
Disadvantages of apartment life for university students: you have to convince someone to rent to you at an affordable price. You have to find furniture and kitchenware and a toilet plunger and dozens of other items that you don’t even think about until you need them. You have keep track of money and pay rent and utilities and cable and other items instead of having a one-time payment at the beginning of the year for the residence lodging and food plan.
And if you’re adjusting to university life for the first time, adding the adjustment to the responsibilities of an apartment at the same time may not be the best idea for everyone.
But when the time comes, it’s worth it… 
I concur with most of the other posters. If I were you I would stay in the dorms for at least your first year, and possibly your second. After that I would probably move off campus.
The main reason I would say dorms is to meet people. I really think you could end up kind of cut off from the rest of the campus socially if you were to bypass dorm living. It seems like a lot of circles of friends form in the dorms and you would be missing out on that if you didn’t live there.
Besides meeting all those new people in the dorms, I think the positives and negatives of living on or off campus pretty much cancel each other out. Its probably a little cheaper overall to live off campus, but probably not that much. You have more freedom off campus, but you don’t have to worry about as much in the dorms. You have more privacy off campus, but you always have people to hang out with in the dorms. It all is a wash in my opinion.
I highly recommend the dorms, at least for your first year. And I’ll echo other responses in saying that it’s an experience that really shouldn’t be missed. My roommates were horrible my freshman year, but I’d do it again. There’s something about the type of friendships and experiences that you just can’t get elsewhere. This isn’t to say that living off campus is bad, it’s just not the same. And being able to roll out of bed 5 minutes before class is unrivaled. Not to mention relatively constant, well, people. You are almost invariably guaranteed something to do.
And perhaps my most convincing argument? I’ve done both. I came back to the dorms as an RA, enticed by offers of free housing, plus a myriad of other benefits I’ve found to living on campus (especially the high-speed free internet access). Which brings me to my next point…
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Orig. posted by even sven:
Oh dear lord no. We have WAY better things to do with our time than to try and catch people. What we do is actually just try and make sure no one is breaking the law, and that those people who do, in fact, have physics tests or what have you the next morning can sleep, rather than listening to the neighbor’s music at 2 AM. And we’re here to help with problems people might want help with. Well, that, and check keys out to people at 3 AM who are locked out. Oh, and did I mention all the times we plan things for people to do so they don’t have to think of it? (Feel free to include any further muttering about how much work I do here, I’m guessing you get the idea.) Mine is a thankless job.
Allow me to clarify for a moment. We do not try to pry into people’s lives. And I certainly haven’t ever prowled. Your experience may have been different, if it was, then I’ll assume you had a bad RA, and I’m sorry for that. Maybe your school handled things differently, I don’t know. Maybe I’m tired of being made out to be evil/nosey/whatever. But our primary purpose here is not to catch people. It’s to help people. Rule enforcement is somewhat of a side effect of that, as we’re also trying to help those people who would like to do wacky things like sleep, or study… Point being that saying that our job is to look in on someone’s life isn’t true, at least not in the way you meant it. Thinking of it more as the person who stops the fire alarm from being pulled at 4 am for no reason, who cleans the puke out of the shower so you don’t have to step in it, or lets you know what’s going on throughout the campus might be a little more accurate overall.
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Wow, a lot of people on this board seem to be very pro-dorm, but i’m yet another one of those people who, to some extent, disagrees. At the same time, living on campus can be an interesting experience, for some. Living in campus housing at a college/university is great, for some people, but certainly not everybody. From a financial standpoint, it depends entirely on your specific situation whether or not, bottom line, a dorm or apartment is going to be more affordable. From a social standpoint, I’ve met approximately the same amount of people both living on and off-campus, although more work is involved if you are living away from campus. Living on campus is fairly self-explanatory, although no one is going to hold a gun to your head and make you “meet” new people if you are totally set against it. I’ve definitely had all of the afforemented “bad experiences” of living on campus, but it is also an excellent opportunity to get adjusted to living “on your own” (to an extent) while still being free of many responsibilities. In short, you can make a lot of silly or stupid mistakes and generally be less responsible and not be held accountable for it. However, if you feel confident in the aspect of being able to “make it” on your own, I don’t see any reason why living in an apartment would be bad. After all, the decision isn’t life and death, you can always change your mind (one way or another) in a year. As far as the resident assistant deal is concerned, I wouldn’t make that a primary concern, as RA’s vary wildly. If you get one like iconoplast, it’s probably great… but i’ve had ra’s that were complete rule-zealots, and one that didn’t enforce any rules (which was a total nightmare).
I grew up an only child. I lived in the dorms for two years. I wish to God I had taken the time to move out instead of taking the easy way of re-signing for my sophomore year.
Yeah, the university will sell you a line of crapola about how much dorms cost compared to an apartment. Now, just think about it, how much would my 525 square foot apartment cost per person if it was divided up into 140 square foot allotments like the dorms at my college were? Mind you, those were DOUBLE rooms. Even allowing that some of that footage was the bathroom, that’s the equivalent of SEVEN people’s living space for $425 a month plus utilities; dorms run about $200 a month. The profit margin is left as an exercise for the student. :rolleyes:
Other than that, the biggest problem is that poor schmuck you’re sharing a room with. You get the luck of the draw; is your roomie going to steal your ATM card, your lunch money, your textbooks, or your underwear, and sell them to the highest bidder? If you trust them, how about their taste in friends? Will their friends do any of those things, either? My university’s solution to thieving roommates was “don’t leave anything valuable in your room.” Yeah, I commonly carry $300 worth of resellable textbooks around with me 24/7, along with every bit of cash I own, my computer, and software.
And there’s the Murphy’s Law of roommates…some of us think that sex is a beautiful and private thing, and we always get the roommates that want to make out while we’re trying to snooze on the top bunk before a physics midterm. Some of us think that nudity is what you have under your bathrobe, and we get the roommates who think the bathrobe is what you hang on the door once you walk in the room. Alcohol is to be indulged in in moderation, or not at all? Your roomie will be the one projectile-carpeting the bathroom in diced carrots at 4 A.M. Studying should be done quietly and on a well-organized desk? Your roomie thinks that studying is best done while pacing the floor to bass-thumping music. And your midterms are the same day.
Get out of the dorms as soon as you humanly can. If you’re going to live with a jackhole, at least you can be responsible for choosing them.
Corr