<p>Freshman halls vary a bit, but there are singles (rare), doubles (by far the most common), and triples. There are many studios, where you can be in either a double or triple with your roommates and no kitchen with a bathroom opening right off the shared bedroom. There are some suites, where there will be a small common room (or vestibule) with bedrooms opening off of it, perhaps:
- two doubles and a common room
- a single and one double and a common room
- a triple and a double and a common room
- three doubles and a common room</p>
<p>Roommates are hard to choose for freshman year. If you do know someone in your year who you would like to live with, when you go through the housing selection process online, there will be an option to search roommates or enter someone’s housing profile username. If you know it, you can enter it and request to live together. In upperclassman years, you have a more complex housing selection process online where you can create groups (kind of like facebook or something similar) and invite your friends into it with a password. With that group you can then choose where you’d like to live by viewing floorplans online and then making your selection when your lottery time lets you.</p>
<p>Communal bathrooms do not exist at NYU. Every room has its own bathroom, i.e. Goddard 305 has its own bathroom just for 305, Palladium 912 has its own just for 912, and so on. If you are in a studio, it will be for however many people are in the bedroom. If you are in a suite, you will have a least one bathroom for that suite. This year (before I went abroad), I was in a 7-person suite with 5 singles, one double, a kitchen, two full bathrooms, and a gigantic common room. Some of my friends were in quads (2 doubles and a common room) with 1.5 bathrooms, and others were in a 5 person room (2 doubles + 1 single) with 2 full bathrooms. It varies.</p>
<p>Meal plans . . . this is a mixed bag. For freshman year, you’re required to have one. Upperclassman years you aren’t, but some kids keep them. Whatever you do, ABSOLUTELY GET THE FLEX. Otherwise you’ll be wasting an incredible amount of money. Most kids get the 14-weekly plan, which is an average of 2 a day. You think you’d eat more than that, but you’d be surprised how often you wind up on Saturday night with 4 left wondering how you’re gonna use them all. The beauty of the FLEX is that it lets you roll them over week to week like AT&T minutes, so as long as you finish them by the end of the semester, you’re good. The 175 FLEX averages out to 13.2 a week or so, which is basically 14.</p>
<p>Besides meal swipes, you get a set number of ‘dining dollars’ too. Those you can use on snacks, drinks, or single food items from any of the cafeterias whenever you want, but once they’re gone, you can’t refill them.</p>
<p>I don’t recommend keeping the meal plan after freshman year because there are so many great ways to eat (even on a budget) in the city that forking over $10 a meal to NYU just isn’t right. The food can be good at certain dorms/certain times (if you get to know the waitstaff they WILL love to hook you up); generally speaking, Hayden is pretty good, Palladium is alright, Rubin is sub-par, Upstein is simply the spot (everyone goes there at least daily), and Downstein is the most cafeteria-like in the traditional college sense (all you can eat buffet for one swipe, earns the nickname “Dirty Downstein”).</p>
<p>Hope this helps.</p>
I hope you have a fantastic and enriching time at Steinhardt (haha, it appears to be the most “human” of the programs; don’t ask me what that means, just that it is a good thing from my perspective).</p>