I’m nearly done with my first year living in a dorm, and although I won’t be living in one for the rest of my college experience I’m curious about others’ experiences.
I live on a large campus with a lot of residential options. I chose my dormitory because it’s a little set off from campus, away from the hustle and bustle, and it’s a nicely designed building, not just a block with rooms. They also had options for people with disabilities (I have a profound hearing loss), so that’s how I ended up with this particular room. It’s a suite, with a large living room area, a little nook, a sink area, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. Initially it was designed so that two people with disabilities would live in each room, but now they are singles, the only ones in this whole dormitory.
The suite is neat because of all the modifications for just about every disability that could pass through. The desk that came with the place goes up and down in height, the shower has a bench, the front door opens automatically, the fire alarms emit sound as well as a flashing light to warn those who can’t hear or see it, and there are some others I can’t think of now. There aren’t many students who choose to take advantage of this, though, hence the rooms being singles. The room next to me (the “B” room of the suite) remained empty for the first half of the first semester, before my Deaf roommate moved in.
She keeps her room much more sparse than mine. Mine is covered in posters and bright things and I have separate areas for everything since I have the room for it. I don’t know how big the other rooms in my dorm are by comparison, I just know I’m lucky to have this space and I enjoy it.
So… I’m curious as I said. How was/is your dorm life?
I was in a dorm last year, and will be moving back next year.
Last year I didn’t have much choice on where to stay. I was on the top floor of the girl’s dorm (very small school, there’s only one dedicated female dorm, the others take girls if necessary) which was all singles. Not bad, I had a decent sized room, a little smaller than my bedroom at home, though the slant of the ceiling was a little annoying at times–I hit my head more than once. Once I got everything reorganised towards the walls, I had a decent amount of floor space. On of my friends would come up occasionally and we’d play DDR side by side in front of my bed, and there’d still be plenty of space by the door. I also liked the floor I was on because it was carpeted, and it had individual bathrooms instead of the stall arrangements of the other floors.
Next year I’ll be in a bigger room in one the the bays–traditionally male dorms but this year one of them is holding eight girls. I’ve also heard that the room I’m taking will have a sink in it, but I don’t know for sure yet. I missed being in touch with campus life this year. I’ll probably decorate similar to last year–a few posters, belongings and clothes strewn about everywhere–though I also plan to bring my TV and game systems, now that I’ll have room for them.
I lived in a very old-fashioned dorm room from fall 1996 to spring 1998 (two years), not these apartment-like dorm suites that they have now. UF assigned dorms and roommates if you didn’t have a roommate worked out in advance, so I didn’t choose mine. My first room had two twin beds with metal frames and posts you could use to bunk them (we kept ours on opposite sides of the room, though), two wooden desks, two wooden dressers, and two small closets built into the front wall on opposite sides of the door. We each bought a mini-fridge early on, and our room was pretty much divided down the center, with the furniture laid out like mirror images on each side. However, I am pretty orderly and my roommate was a slob, so the invisible boundary line was quite obvious–his side was covered with clothes and papers on every surface, and mine was clean and clear. It was larger than my room at home, which I had previously shared with my brother until I was 18 and left for college. When everyone else was freaking out about the small space and sharing of quarters, I thought it was an upgrade!
My roommate brought in a small TV with the old 8-bit Nintendo, which proved quite popular (since everyone on our floor was between 18 and 20, and we had all grown up playing Nintendo in the mid-'80s). We definitely had one of the “cool rooms” on our floor. I didn’t own a computer then, just an electric typewriter which took up a corner of my desk. I decorated the walls on my side with posters (Pulp Fiction with Uma Thurman lying on the bed, and Shirley Manson from the band Garbage), flyers for local shows I had gone to, and action figures in their original packages, unopened. Our ceiling already had constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars on it, which we left alone.
After my first year, we all had to move out for the summer, but I chose to return to the same floor for the second year. As a sophomore, I got a single room which was just like my original room, but half the size. It was tiny, but suited me perfectly at the time. I liked dorm life a lot, but the times were generally happier and a lot less complicated then.
I had the most bitchin’ dorm room - complete with the *6 foot x 4 foot * poster of Wham! (Yes those dimensions are correct. Hey, it was 1985! Give me a break!)
I have a regular old dorm room. Floorspace is about 12’ x 6’ and has an en-suite which in Uni terms means shower, toilet and sink in a 4’x4’ cubicle. Apparently I’m very lucky for our whole court to be in such good condition. According to my friends, my court and it’s sister courts are all part of “the Ghetto”. More drug dealing stories than you could shake a stick at. That’s all gone now though. I share a kitchen/living room area with 5 others although thankfully my room is my own. We have 3 inflatable pieces of furniture, and a foosball table (mine) I have 3 posters, Spongebob Squarepants, Eve L and Kiss. I used to have a huge tiedye cover on my wall (6’ x 8’) but it kept falling off and smothering me. Every wednesday they test the fire alarm at around 11am. Occasionally we do fire drills where we have to leave the building at 4 in the morning. If we don’t we lose our room. All rooms have heat and smoke fire alarms, except the kitchen so I smoke there or outside.
I think that’s it…Oh wait. On the first day I wrote the word F*** in huge letters in the gravel between my court and the neighbour with my flatmates.
I get into a tiny elevator with almost everything I own and traveled up 16 stories to my first dorm room. I unlock and open the door and the first thing that I noticed is that it looked more like a prison than anything else. Two metal framed beds, two dressers, two desks, two closets built out into the room, a small set of windows and a single florecent light over the door, which is in the corner. When I was on my third roommate of the year, ie, October, I finally got one that was smart enough to help we re-arrange the furniture. It was a comfy, large room, if well, dark, do to the lack of light. Posters on the walls, throw rugs, a couch, which took some creative dorm room tetris to fit into it. Oh, and there was a hole in the wall that they said they’d fix and never did.
This year we have a suite, with is two doubles, a common room, a bathroom with a shower and a sink and a bathroom with a toilet and a sink. We’ve tried posters, but most of them won’t stay up. It is reminisent of our old room, though, as it is dark the old room. We miss it, though, as living in a suite is very isolatory.
My dorm room (1991) was slightly larger than a walk-in closet. It had two built in twin beds with drawers in the base about 2 feet apart from one another. The door to the room opened between them. The walls were covered in pegboard (like you would expect to see in a workshop). There were built in desks at the foot of each bed (lengthwise) and one tiny window. There were bathrooms on each floor of the co-ed residence, no sinks, etc. in room. Neither of us had a TV. We rented a bar fridge for $100 for the school year and split that 4 ways (with two other students in another room) so we could keep our beer cold.
I live in the greatest university-sponsored living conditions ever. It’s Mallet Assembly, a self-governing (no RA’s) men’s honors dorm at the University of Alabama. We make our own rules, throw our own parties, our rooms are the largest, and we have the lowest rates.
I painted my room red (yeah, we get to paint our rooms), spent about $150 on posters and other decorations, and now I’ve got the greatest dorm room…ever.
(Ignore the Mexican in the second picture - she doesn’t live there ;j )
Here’s a picture of my dorm room. My roommate moved out in January, so her side of the room (left side) has been taken over by my stuff. I use her desk to do homework on and put random stuff on her bed. This picture was taken from right inside the door, so that’s really how small it is. The bathroom and showers are down the hall. The curtains are ugly.
This picture shows my “closet.” Again, since my roomie moved out I’ve taken over hers, so I have a bit more space to put my clothes.
Mine is actually one of the better halls to live in because it’s smaller (so it’s not quite as long a walk down the hall to the showers) and has air conditioning (only one of the other dorms does).
Next year I’m (hopefully) going to live in an on-campus townhouse with four of my friends. I’m looking forward to having a kitchen and a better bathroom.
Geez, I got ripped. At my undergraduate school (UM-Rolla) we had a Freshman/Sophomore live-in rule, requiring you to live on campus or approved housing. What was it like? In a word: Pit. These were cinderblock shoeboxes, double occupancy, one window that would open about five degrees and overlooked beautiful Interstate 44. Power was a sometimes thing (frequent outages, enhanced by every joker who decided to play with the readily accessible breaker box at all hours of the night), toilets regularly overflowed, cleaning was done only Tuesday to Thursday (one Friday evening blood-and-vomit wall decoration in the bathroom remained there for four days), and dorm rules about quiet time were enforced or not depending on how much you sucked up to the RA. We all got to pay end-of-term damages (around $200 per) into a common pool.
No cable or ethernet access in the rooms. (This is in the late '80s/early '90s, when other colleges were starting to offer this as a matter of course.) IBM 3270 dumb terminals down in the basement, nominally available from 4pm to 12am, depending on whether a monitor showed up or not. Food…well, let’s just say they didn’t serve any in the cafeteria, but that’s getting beyond the dorm room. Oh, we weren’t allowed microwaves or toaster ovens in the room (fire hazard) and you had to pay a “service fee” for beer fridges. Ditto for telephone service–$50/month as I recall. It’s a dry campus, of course, so no beer, not that this stopped people from sneaking in beer, though oddly for an engineering school, nobody was distilling alcohol so far as I knew.
All of this for $500/mo. Frankly, pretty crappy, and I paid the following year for both a dorm room AND off-campus housing, and still had to argue with Residential Life that being of junior standing after my third semester entitled me to escape out from under their thumb, only after a threat of legal action. In retrospect, I should have joined a frat–Triangle, maybe–and dealt with that instead of the heaping crap from ResLife. Live and learn.
Well, according to the school, the dimensions of my room are:
room: 14’11" x 11’8"
closet: 53"w x 30"d
window: 81"w x 61"h (with vertical blinds)
These are about the biggest rooms on campus, but what really makes the room great (besides the location) are the closets. They are huge and sunk in, so you don’t lose any noticable floor space. They also have the effect of making the room seem larger than it is.
What’s really great is the location. I’m right between the food and the building I spend the most time in, and only about 1 minute or less to either. It’s coed by room, which is nice, because I think the presence of the opposite sex has a moderating effect on behavior. (I’m still wondering how many of the problems I had freshman year were due to the fact that the housing was basically all freshmen, and how many were because it was an all-male floor.) I’m on the room on the very end, which makes it fairly quiet because we only have one adjoining room. My roommate and I like it enough that we’ve lived here for the last three years, the first year on the third floor and the next two years in the same room on the second floor.
Some of you have it made! I haven’t gone to college yet but I have visited a couple of dorms. On average, they have about 3’ by 5’ of open walkspace, not counting the (paltry) area behind the desks. Usually, they have one couch/futon, one bunk bed, two desks, and two closets. The rest of the space taken up by one window and a 2’ “depth” dedicated to housing the electronics. Nothing besides a poster or two adorned the walls. Just white all around. Think prison.
(Both had really nice dorms otherwise - they were just reserved for either froshies or honors kids.)
Oh, did I forget to mention that last year, for second semester, we almost never had any hot water, and I don’t mean there was always a lack of quantity, I mean that occasionally there’d be some, usually not. And between the hours of 11 pm and 8 am, there was often no running water above the 11th floor. I loved walking up and down five flights of stairs in my pjs to use a random sink were I could find water. Or having to go all the way down, across the street, into another building and begging th RA on duty to let us use there bathrooms. And I’m not exagerating.
Oh, and the room was usually about 85 degrees with the windows open and the fan on.
Here are some photos of my room, taken towards the beginning of the year. My roommate’s got the same setup (minus the TV stand) on the opposite wall. There are 16 other rooms on the floor and two bathrooms with four showers, sinks, and toilets each. Could be worse, but I’ll be glad to be in a suite-style dorm next semester.
My first trip to college was in 1980 - Oklahoma State University - Cordell Hall
(Give em Hell Cordell)
it was like the dorm rooms many of you said… room for 2 small closets, 2 beds, 2 desks. Bathroom was down the hall. I was on the first floor. I liked it. It was CoEd, which meant that there were females in the building too! Too bad their idea of coed was Girls get the north wing, boys get the rest of the building.
E3
Yes, the room was far better that way. You forgot to mention that the hockey team lived on the floor above us, and they constantly hit their sticks on the floor (that just sounds wrong). And you forgot the snow.
I was laying in bed one morning, I’d say it was about 6am. I woke up and said to gfloyd “It’s snowing” to which she replied “I don’t care, it’s 6am.” I didn’t just mean it was snowing outside, though “it’s snowing on my face” said I.
Ah, trekking down to the 7th floor to brush our teeth at 2am because of a lack of water. I do not miss those days.
Mr Sakamoto, that is one cool room. Love that shade of red.
I like my residence quite a bit. It’s not a concrete tower but a more house-y place built in the 30’s (I’d show you pictures but then you’d Know Where I Live!), and most of the rooms are singles. Mine seems to be about 10’ x 13’ with plenty of room for dresser, bed, 2 bookshelves, computer desk, 2 cushioned if not exactly comfy chairs, and space to put down a rug and set up my laundry rack. (There’s also a closet.) The walls are plain white save a couple of posters; the doors and baseboard are nicely contrasting dark wood. Austere maybe, but comfortable.
I lucked out and got into the most luxurious dorm on campus, which had semi-private half-bathrooms (a toilet and sink, shared between two doubles). We also had a maid who cleaned the little half-bathroom every week. The room itself was the typical, concrete-block-walled cube. Two beds, two desks, one dresser, a chair, and a table with attached lamp. One whole wall was built-in closets, so there weren’t many furniture arranging options. We couldn’t control the heat ourselves, so it was always about 95 degrees, and we kept the windows open all winter. I was too lazy to paint the room, so my second year, I simply requested the room next door, which was already a normal color.
One thing I hated was that the mattresses were extra long, so normal twin sheets didn’t fit on them. I suspected that the school bought them when the mattress manufacturer screwed up and made them the wrong size. Very annoying.
One summer, I took classes at another college, and the dorm room was Z-shaped. Odd, but it gave more privacy to the occupants.