Rooms

The College Dorm Survival Guide: How to Survive and Thrive in Your New Home Away from Home
by Julia DeVillers

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Face it, not all rooms are created equal. There's a huge variety in dorm room sizes, shapes, and how many people are stuffed into each one. And hey, most dorm rooms are small. Maybe smaller than the bedroom you grew up in. And you're sharing it with a stranger. Feeling claustrophobic? "Just think of the campus as your house. Your room is just where you are sleeping. Your living room is the lounge or the student center, your kitchen is the dining hall, the campus library is your study space," says George Brelsford, assistant vice president for Student Affairs and dean of students at Rowan University (NJ)

Kinds of Rooms

Singles: Yeah! Your own space! Privacy, nobody to fight with. Then again, nobody to bond with. Might be harder to find someone to hit the dining hall with you.

The First Dorms

The first residence halls at Oxford and Cambridge were built during the Middle Ages in the thirteenth century to fill the needs of students flocking to universities. (Many of them have both a dining hall and a small bar.) At the University of Paris, students camped in tents or burrowed themselves into the sides of the surrounding hills. In time they moved to live individually with schoolmasters or townspeople. Much later they started to rent big houses.

The first American dorms opened with the founding of nine colonial colleges - today's Ivy League universities. From the very beginning, they all had on-campus housing. Think your dorms are crazy?

• Fights, duels, and even murders were common in halls.
• Faculty and staff members were scared to death at the thought of being asked to go into a college dormitory.
• The halls were viewed by the public as places where one learns only bad manners.

Adapted from the website of Dr. Slobodan Box Zunic, adjunct professor of philosophy and hall director at the University of Rhode Island

Doubles: Another person to bond with. Then again, if you don't click, it's you versus them. You're stuck with this person, good or bad. (For now, anyway. More about dealing with a less-than-perfect roommate later.)

Triples: Now you can bond with two people. Or, there can be two people to drive you crazy. If you're three stuffed into a small room, it's going to be crowded. And three's a crowd if two people bond and the other person is left out.

The Presidential Dorm?

"After exploring numerous avenues to meet the growing need [for student housing], we have offered to make our house available for housing 10-12 students," said the e-mail from Hannibal-LaGrange College's (MO) president, Woodrow Burt. He and his wife, English professor Katherine Burt, moved to temporary housing so twelve female students could still live on campus during their senior year.

- The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 13, 2004; the Boston Globe at boston.com, August 18, 2004; August 20, 2004

Suites: Several students to bond with. But these rooms can also get cliquey if you only hang with people inside your suite. It can even get cliquey inside if some suitemates gang up on other ones.

Palaces and Dungeons

Princeton Review publishes a list of college rankings, which includes lists of the best and the worst dorms. Here are the 2004 rankings:

Dorms Like Palaces

1. Pepperdine (CA)
2. Loyola College (MD)
3. Smith College (MA)
4. Scripps College (CA)
5. Bryn Mawr (PA)

Dorms Like Dungeons

1. University of Oregon
2. Florida A&M University
3. United States Coast Guard Academy (CT)
4. United States Merchant Marines (NY)
5. SUNY University at Albany (NY)

Students are able to immerse themselves in a total experience when they live on campus. They meet new people, study together, and make friends for life. They build a network that serves them well into their future. Many colleges and universities have or are creating living-learning environments where students and faculty from an area of specialty (or honors programs) live and work within the same residence hall. It is exceptional!

- Sallie Traxler, executive director of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International

Copyright © 2006 by Julia DeVillers. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Julia DeVillers is the author of several books, including Girlwise: How to Be Confident, Capable, Cool, and In Control and How My Private, Personal Journal Became a Bestseller. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.