<p>The best all you can eat dining halls are definitely on west campus-- personally, I think Cook is the best, followed by Keeton.</p>
<p>If you have an hour off for lunch, seems like you could easily make it over to West, eat, and get back to your next class, no? (I know that will depend to some extent exactly where your classes are, but it’s not <em>that</em> far. My perspective is that when I was in uni. we had to get an unlimited plan, and we had to go back to the dorms to get meals on our plan, so we just did that, and our campus was almost as big as Cornell’s, so it seems weird to me that it’s standard for kids to eat only a fraction of their meals in the dining halls at Cornell (and many other schools we visited)).</p>
<p>Going down to West for lunch is actually pretty inconvenient. Libe slope is a pain to walk up and down, and the lunch selections in the dorms are pretty limited (don’t know about 104West though). I don’t know anyone who goes down to West in the middle of the day for lunch, only to trek back up again. Most people who eat lunch on West actually live there, and have all of their classes either before or after lunchtime.</p>
<p>If you have a lot of time and want to use a meal swipe, I actually don’t think Okenshields is that bad. Otherwise, you can use your BRBs around campus (Trillium, the Ivy Room, Cascadelli, etc)…greater variety of food + much more convenient than dealing with the slope.</p>
<p>About how much would you spend on lunch at one of the BRB locations? Seems like those BRBs would go fast, and end up costing a lot more than what you save on the lower-end meal plan.</p>
<p>Can someone explain the BRB to me? do you get a certain amount with tuition? do you just buy them? do they reset every so often?</p>
<p>thanks for being patient with me</p>
<p>If you go to the dining part of the Cornell website it will give you chapter and verse. Basically, most plans include x number of meals per week plus y$$ of Big Red Bucks. The BRBs give you more flexibility and I think you can carry over excess BRBs from fall to spring semester, but not year to year. My son said there were always people at the end of the spring semester buying meals for friends to use up their BRBs.</p>
<p>premed, look at the descriptions of the meal plans: [Dining</a> - Meal Plan Options](<a href=“Residential Life | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University”>Residential Life | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University)</p>
<p>Each plan comes with a certain amount in BRB built-in to the price. You can add more as needed, by paying for them (or getting your parents to do so). I believe leftover fall BRBs carry over to spring semester.</p>
<p>BRBs are only usable for food, by the way. Our tour guide lamented (jokingly) that they Cornell shop would not allow him to buy video games with them. 
There is another way to have a more generic debit balance on your id card, I believe. Presumably they separate out the BRBs so that parents who want to pay for their student’s food (but not other luxuries) can be sure that the bucks will be used as intended.</p>
<p>Is it required for freshman to get a meal plan? Is it possible to get one and cancel it if you don’t want one? And is it possible to just get BRBs without a meal plan?</p>
<p>Yes, no, no - as far as I know</p>