I just spoke with my former neighbor from last year. He’s staying at another neighbor’s this weekend because the dorm he lives in (University of St. Thomas) is closed for the four day holiday weekend.
Is that unusual? I don’t recall the dorms where I went to school doing that.
The dorms where I go close for holidays unless the students have made prior arrangements. The student union is closed and the health center and police station run on a skeleton-crew basis.
My dorms close for winter and summer vacations, but remain open for Thanksgiving, Spring Break, and all other minor breaks. Dining halls stay open on Thanksgiving but close during Spring Break.
The dorms at UH remained open during the Thanksgiving break and Spring Break. The Towers and the Quadrangle shut down for the Winter Break, but Cougar Place remains open during that time and accepts residents who live in the other two complexes but don’t have anywhere else they want to be during the break (this does cost them extra).
My last year working in the dorms there, my Area Coordinator was a graduate of Indiana University. He found it ridiculous that the UH dorms stayed open for Thanksgiving and Spring Break since IU shut down their dorms for those breaks. I could see the point; I was always the unfortunate person stuck being on-call during part of Thanksgiving and Spring Break.
I also know that several other schools do the same thing: shut down the dorms during week-long breaks from school. The RA’s I talked to about this were all from schools in the Northeast and Midwest. I guess it just depends on the school and whether the housing departments feels like eating the costs of staying open during those times.
My college closes all but two dorms over our week-long Thanksgiving break. I don’t live in the ones that’re staying open, and I don’t know any girls who do (if I had, I could’ve stayed in their room). As a result, I’m staying in a lounge over Thanksgiving break with someone I’ve never met before in my life. So it happens here.
Our dorms shut down over Thanksgiving and Spring breaks. It is possible to stay over if you have a very good reason (as in the case of foreign exchange students), but I don’t imagine it’s much fun as the dining hall and all the other campus buildings are shut down.
IIRC, we always had one or two dorms open at Adrian, even for the summer vacation, as they offered courses over the summer. I’ve no idea if the dining hall was open then or not.
I guess that’s a key RealityChuck. The school in question (UST) has, I’d guess, a student body of ~5000. The school I went to is about ten times that size, and kept the dorms open. There were a lot of people who didn’t really have much of anywhere else they could easily go.
I know Texas A&M’s dorms stayed open during Thanksgiving and Spring Break- I was an RA, and had the option of getting extra pay to stick around and work.
They don’t exactly stay open as such during Christmas- they do have maybe one dorm stay open during Christmas break for the exchange students and others that have nowhere to go though. I think you have to have a damn good reason to qualify- something along the lines of “I’m from Tibet, and I can’t afford to go home and come back.”, not “I don’t want to stay with my parents for 3 weeks”.
As far as summer goes, the dorms are open, although not all of them are open for students- they also house cheerleading camps, football camps, soccer camps, band camps, firefighters, etc… in some of the dorms.
Texas A&M has something like 9000 on-campus dorm spots, so they have plenty of room in the summers to do this.
In the cases where one dorm is left open and the rest closed, people move into other people’s rooms for the long weekend or spring break?? That’s INSANE!
Both my school and my SO’s schools stay open over Thanksgiving and Spring break, and special arrangements can be made over Christmas breaks if there is really no where for you to go (eg foreign students whose visa’s don’t let them return home). During Thanksgiving and Spring break, the on-campus food services are VERY limited, but availible at usual meal times, though they are closed over Christmas. Our schools consider the in-semester breaks to be part of the semester, insofar as you are paying for your rent in residence, you can stay there if you feel like it. Over the summer, some residence buildings are open for in-course students to live in, and at least one at each school is maintained as a youth hostel during those months.
I can’t believe schools would kick out what are essentially tenants from their rooms because of a holiday! If it’s during the semester, the student should be allowed to stay there if they fell like it. I can understand clearing out between semesters, but at least let people stay if they absolutely need to!
The university I am transferring from and the one I will be attending both shut the dorms down for breaks that are a week or longer. I think a student should be able to stay if there is a reason…like work.
At Webster, they left the dorms open, but they turned off the heat - without telling anyone. It got down to about 55 in my room overnight. I stayed, though I could have gone to my grandma’s house for the weekend and slept on the couch. Wish they’d told me about the heat, though.
mnemosyne, how it works at my school (and probably everyone else’s) is that only the slots that are empty as of the end of the fall semester are offered to the students in the other dorms for winter break housing. If a 10 people leave a 400-bed dorm at the end of the fall, then 10 people could stay in that dorm for the winter break. Anyone else wanting in would be turned away. The closest I can think of a situtation like the one you describe would be a hall with 2+ person rooms where only one roommate moves out at the end of the fall. That situation, in my mind, would be more like a person getting a new roommate (just only for a month). But it does brings a sticking in my mind: what if the sole remaining original roommate of that room goes home for the break anyway? We never had to deal with that problem (our only winter housing were 1-person rooms).
bump, y’all got paid to work over those breaks? I’m so jealous. Not only did we get diddly squat extra, but we had to deal with no open food services, no co-RAs or senior staff on-call to cover while we ran to McDonalds, and tons of extra desk shifts (because the desk assistants would skip 'em like mad).
At Johns Hopkins, the dorms close for Thanksgiving, winter break, and spring break, except for a very small amount of vacation housing that remains open for Thanksgiving and spring break. All the foreign students I knew had to go home with roommates or friends during breaks.
They close at my school too. Though the vast majority of the students are from the area, so it’s really not a big deal for them to go home. They leave one dorm open for the rest of them who can’t make it home.