<p>Following up on discussions of teen drinking and general mayhem at college, I started wondering about something that Texas137 has mentioned. There is apparently a particular dorm, at a particular school that some young people she knows are slated to attend, in which there are many top award winners in various academic competitions. They get a suitable peer group for their interests not only by being at that school, but by all being at the same dorm. (How?) </p>
<p>So my question is, what is the culture of that dorm? Is it "substance-free," or "word hard, play hard"? To the best of my knowledge and belief, some schools have an essentially random process of dorm assignment and roommate assignment (like the one my son encountered at CTY last summer), so I'm wondering what a dorm that gathers together academic award winners would look like. </p>
<p>Oh, and of course I'd be delighted to hear about this from anyone else, but what Texas137 said prompted the thread, so I hope I'll hear from her among others.</p>
<p>At Penn State they have a variety of options for the students. There is a First Year in Engineering dorm (as you can imagine the number of options for majoring in engineering are great), substance free dorms (non smokers and non drinkers), healthy living dorms, and honors students dorms, etc. There are a great number of options but you have to sign up early. I had encoraged son to go into one of the engineering dorms as I felt the advice from upper classmen in these dorms could be valuable. But as it turned out son is rooming with 2 other local friends, they are good kids and I'm pleased. The larger universities do have different dorm options so you can room with those you may have things in common with.</p>
<p>I'll be attending UVA this year as an Echols Scholar. Echols Scholars (honors people in the college of arts & sciences) and the Rodman Scholars (honors people in the engineering school) live together in three suite-style dorm buildings. The rest of the first-year students have the option of living in general hallway or suite-style dorms, or applying to live in one of three residential colleges. I'll find out soon enough what each situation is like, but I'd imagine that the Echols?Rodman housing is a bit quiter and more studious than the rest of student housing.</p>
<p>USC offers a bunch of different living theme things (musical theatre, latin floor, GLBT, women in engineering/sciences) in addition to two honors dorms for scholarship recipients. Also, one ranks several dorm choices, and some have a reputation as being "party" dorms or "quiet dorms."</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon offers a wellness house, a 24-hour quiet dorm, and a community service oriented dorm (used to be a frat house). Not sure about it yet, but supposedly the three all-freshman dorms are more social than the rest of the dorms.</p>
<p>I appreciate the information about the other campuses. I don't think that my alma mater had any "honor dorm" when I went there, so this is a new concept to me. Would the general consensus be that dorm with top academic admittees = dorm with less drinking and drug use, or not so?</p>
<p>This is a tad bit off topic, and not very helpful, but I did CTY for 4 years, and they are entirley random in their pairings except for the fact that your in the same class (with a very few exceptions). They don't even ask you to fill out the typical roommate questions (what time you sleep, music interests etc.) because your only there for 3 weeks, so if your son has had bad experiences with that, it's not a good judge of roommate pairing.</p>
<p>I will say though, that some of the smartest people I know going to some of the best schools (Stanford, USC, Princeton, Columbia) are also some of the hardest partiers, so smartest does not mean safest. Work hard, party harder is a phrase that comes to mind.</p>
<p>D lived in the Honor's College dorms for 2 years at her large OOS Public U. While they might be more "sedate" during weekdays,and maybe it's seen as ok to study hard, they still are freshman,and freshman by their very nature do crazy things they should know better not to do..like drop bowling balls off of rooftops ,etc. It's the nature of the beast I think,all those young ones with hormones,access to alcohol, and the first tastes of freedom.Hard to say but yes certain dorms at certain schools do have reputations,not necessarily deserved.
What I've heard about "wellness"dorms is that the kids still drink,but not IN that dorm so the bathrooms stay cleaner (hallways too),there's less drama as you have to try to sober up somewhat before returning to your rooms and its less noisy b/c the kids are going elsewhere to party hard.</p>
<p>My D spent her first year in an OOS public U Honors Dorm. Spent many a night holding others' heads over toilets, and helping them evade getting caught. Wasn't a happy year for her.</p>
<p>I suspect you are thinking about Random at MIT? My S has a firend staying there. He loves the ability to form impromptu study groups or just join a math conversation in mid-stream. He has not talked of inappropriate behavior. His chief vice is an addiction to DDR.</p>
<p>I'm sure token must be referring to Random, and yes, many math-ies prefer to live there. Note that there are very few openings there each year (I think 15 this year?) so it's quite hard to get in, not everyone who lives there is a math competition winner :), and there are similar competition winners and math-ies in other dorms. Study groups form among peers in most of the dorms, although perhaps with a slightly different focus in Random. Don't make the mistake of thinking that "the top academic admittees" are all in Random or all in any single dorm at MIT: nothing would be further from the truth (unless all you care about is math competitions).</p>
<p>My real point is that, at MIT as at many others, each of the dorms has a true character of its own, and no dorm is immune from substances unless so designated. (None of the dorms at MIT are "substance-free".) When my S visited MIT, he immediately found a dorm and dorm culture he fell in love with, and is thrilled to have been assigned there in the lottery. It's not, however, a good idea to get one's sights set on any specific dorm, 'cause there's no guarantee you'll end up there. He was lucky this time.</p>
<p>Thanks, Mootmom, for the detailed reply about MIT, which indeed was the school I thought I had heard such a thing about. The facts that you and Marite added to the discussion are very helpful for me understanding other statements I had heard about various MIT dorms before. I don't understand the process of dorm selection/assignment at ANY college, so one of my learning adventures in the next few years will be finding out who this all works out for my son.</p>
<p>Dorm assignment is different at different colleges. I believe that at MIT a student can request to room with a specific student; that is not true of Harvard. Nonetheless, it appears that one of my S's suitemates will be a mathy guy; the others won't. They also come from totally different geographical areas and seem to have different political leanings. It will be a very interesting situation. No doubt the housing staff wanted it that way.</p>
<p>My son is in East Campus at MIT. Each dorm is different and each floor is different. His floor has only 3 or 4 students who drink/party. And there are a few "ghosts." But most study and build stuff and hang out together. Some floors are more party floors or more hard-core study floors or more "building things and/or blowing them up" floors. Turned out that a lot of people on his floor are EECS majors. He was surprised that there was such a difference.</p>
<p>Mootmom and Marite are right, you are probably thinking of some mention I may have made about Random at MIT. And Mootmom is also correct that it is NOT the case that the top admittees all end up there, like an honors dorm might work at a state college. It is simply that there are kids who have done certain math summer programs (like MOP) who all happen to know each other. At some point in the past a critical mass of them (maybe only 2-3) happened to be at Random. MIT lets students select their dorms via a lottery, so others requested Random because they already knew those 2-3 kids, and it expanded and perpetuated itself. It is not a magnet for kids who have done academic competitions generally, or even math competitions generally. It is just a particular couple of selective summer math programs where kids form close friendships and then apply to the same handful of colleges. MIT makes no effort to segregate kids by dorm. The kids in other dorms are just as smart, just as desirable to admissions, and just as amazing as kids in Random. But if they don't happen to already know a bunch of people in Random, they would have no particular reason to choose that dorm over any other. Other dorms at MIT, or at other colleges where kids get to choose their dorms, may have similar clusters of kids who know each other coming in because of the high school they attended, home town, other competitions, sports, or something else.</p>
<p>Thanks, Texas, that makes the situation much clearer. And now I get to comment that "Random" has got to be one of the most, er, random names for a dorm I have ever heard. The first time I saw it in print I thought it was a joke.</p>
<p>Virginia Tech has a special honors dorm named Hillcrest Hall. It is small with only space for about a hundred students. Freshmen are generally not admitted. The staff of the Honors program is located in the same building. </p>
<p>MIT has an interesting housing system. I think I understand it....</p>
<p>Students list their preferences for dorms and can specify a name of a requested room mate; this is input for initial placement lottery that assigns an initial dorm room. (According to the CC MIT thread, every received a top 3 choice (and there are 15 choices).) After the students arrive, there is a dorm 'rush' and a second lottery for those who want to move. My understanding is that - in the past - the inital lottery had no relation to where a student would end up. Now, (I think) if a student is happy to stay with the initally assigned dorm, the student will stay in that dorm (although there is virtual certainty that the student will change rooms).</p>