Dorm Lifestyle

I plan to live in witte or sellery next year. Can anyone please tell me more info about the two dorms.

Well first of all those dorms are hard to get into.
They’re like nonstop parties and everyone has alcohol.
They’re also kind of the grossest dorms on campus.

Still, people LOVE them.

Witte and Sellery are not difficult to get into. They do look like the slums. You will make the best friends of your life there. It’s a collective misery thing.

@SaraCo Witte and Sellery are not difficult to get in to. They both house over 1,100 residents, a majority of which are freshmen.

Sellery and Witte each house over 1000 students. Each building has two towers, A and B, each with just over 500 students in each tower. On my kid’s freshman floor, I think there were two halls off the elevator bank, each with about 10-12 rooms (all doubles), so about 20-24 kids per side, or 50 students per floor. Each floor, I think, had a House Fellow, similar to an RA at other schools, who organizes events the beginning of the year for students to get to know each other and acclimate to UW. My kid still is close friends, or at least has great bonding experience memories, with his hall-mates.

Rooms are fine sized, nothing fancy, but perfectly livable. Bathrooms are single sex, though genders are mixed on each hall (guys room can be next to a women’s room).

Both Sellery and Witte are next to Gordon’s the large, new, southeast neighborhood dining hall. For Witte you have to crosse the street to get there, for Sellery it is just across a plaza.

My son loved the craziness and energy of Sellery/Witte, though he did acknowledge that hearing people crash down the hall at 3am on the weekends got kind of old, unless he was also doing it.

Slum??? Res Halls maintains its buildings. If things get grungy as the year progresses blame the students who are messy. Not every building will be shiny and new just because the students are new. Many other dorms are genuinely ancient. I find Barnard forboding, for example.

Agree with wis75 that Sellery and Witte are hardly slums. The buildings are well-maintained, good services and support. Each floor has a commons room, with den chairs, some tables, and TV. Sellery had an academic advising office on the ground floor, and there is a seminar sized class room on the ground floor since some typical freshman intro lectures will have their discussion section assigned to meet there. There was a computer lab for printing, and a very nice laundry room, as I recall. After moving into an apartment sophomore year, my kid definitely missed the convenience of having a front desk to receive his packages, and having someone else clean the bathrooms.

They’re tiny, nasty and old. They sucked in the 70s and they suck now.

Wrong. They are a lot newer than many other dorms, the rooms ar4e no smaller than in many other dorms. Nasty? I bet they start out as clean and well kept as the rest of the dorms. The problem may be with residents who trash their home. They were NOT considered nasty in the early 1970’s, in fact they were among the newer dorms back then. The old OGG was the bad dorm- a reason it was torn down while much older dorms remain.

Witte and Sellery are difficult to get into. On the day placement comes out you will see hundreds, if not a thousand, students complain they did not get to live there.
They do house high numbers but they dorms like Slitcher, are almost a shoo-in.

Despite your chances of getting your most preferred dorm rank it first. Someone has to be the lucky one to get the top choice. The only caveat is to be sure to rank most to least desired- double check to be sure a bottom choice didn’t end near the top. Then, accept your assignment and be prepared to find people and a place you can love no matter what you originally thought.