I have heard that dorms at Brown are very run down - have they been renovated recently? How bad are they really?
Also, any advice on getting a good dorm room / which buildings are nicest?
At admitted students day I visited Andrews Commons (Andrews, Metcalf, Miller), but I did not visit the other Freshman dorms in Keeney Quad (Jameson-Mead, Everett-Poland, Archibald-Bronson). The tour guide said the dorms in Keeney Quad are similar. I thought the room we were shown was very big by dorm standards. We weren’t shown the bathrooms for privacy purposes. The common area on the main floor was decent. The kitchen area was dark. Everything but the common area on the main floor looked older and tired, but I didn’t see any paint coming off the walls or bugs or anything like that. Personally, I’d rather have a little tired and bigger room than a newer, smaller room.
The dorms in Keeney Quad were renovated just before my daughter was a freshman in 2013. She and her roommate had a two-room double, which they were just lucky to get by random assignment. I saw the bathrooms, they were communal and in good condition.
Freshmen do not have any input on dorm assignments, but I think all the freshman dorms are ok.
There are other recent posts on this subject. Several (at least) of the freshman dorms are quite nice.
The freshman dorms are definitely nice, as in way above average. Like, I didn’t expect rooms that size, and I lived in Keeney which often has smaller and older rooms than Andrews Commons. Emory Wooley (emwool) and Morris Champlin (mochamp) are definitely not quite as good but still pretty nice and not small.
However, its the upperclassmen dorms that are decidedly worse. Even the best dorms are still a step down (I think). Some are just old, although they are renovating a few this summer (including Minden, which has huge suites but is very run down), but others like Perkins and Pembroke are decidedly below average for college dorms (far away from most things on campus and tiny and ugly).
But the dorms overall are average (and they’re probably my least favorite thing about Brown, so that means everything else is great) if that puts things into perspective.
@ciervo Were they in Archibald-Bronson? I’ll be a freshman in the fall and I think my roommate and I might have gotten the same room based on the floor plans (!!!), but it seems to good to be true…
Yes, it was Archibald-Bronson. I think there were a couple of rooms on each floor with that set-up. I was told that those rooms used to be two singles that were reconfigured into a two-room double, but it wasn’t clear how the inner room could have had a door to the hallway. It was great room—enjoy!!