<p>Hello everyone,</p>
<p>I’m just wondering what dorms you guys like and how campus is? I didn’t get to visit, but I have a friend that’s really hoping for BU (he didn’t visit either), and he needs some advice. He would post, but he refuses to give up being a lurker.</p>
<p>Are the dorms old or new? I’ve heard rumors that the heating is terrible.</p>
<p>How is the food… really? </p>
<p>Any fun things to do close to campus (other than the typical Boston stuff)?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>Unless you’re going to a school in West, like Fine Arts or have a reeeeal attachment to the gym, don’t bother living in West. Towers and Warren are real popular Freshman dorms, but the rooms are incredibly tiny, the lighting is bad, it looks like a prison cell, and you share the bathroom with your floor. Hojo is a step up. It has A/C and the rooms are considerably bigger. It doesn’t have a dining hall but you can go to any other dining hall. It depends on how lazy you are if this matters. I haven’t lived in all the brownstones so I can’t tell you what they’re like. I can only tell you that the Music House can get loud when people decide it’s okay to break out into song or start playing guitar in their rooms past quiet hours. And there are bugs.</p>
<p>As a BU freshman, I live in Warren. Nickel Xenon’s opinion differs from mine. Yes, Warren is a predominantly freshman dorm. From the outside, it looks pretty ugly (although it totally grow on you…just as the seemingly long street campus becomes quite a true campus over time). The rooms are average for a freshman college dorm. My friends from other schools generally say my room is the same size as their own standard doubles. You can get lucky with great views. I have a gorgeous one on an upper level floor. It looks down onto Comm Ave/Brookline/The Charles and we get sunsets. The lights they install are pretty flourescent. But nearly everyone I know has an additional desk light anyways. It doesn’t matter very much at all. If you decorate decently, it’s not very prison-cell-esque either. Communial bathrooms really aren’t that big of a deal. Again, maybe it’s not luxurious…but you get over it super fast. It’s just typical dorm life. Warren has common rooms which facilitate a tight-knit floor atmosphere easier than some other dorms. I am very close with my floor friends. It can get kind of loud here and there, but it’s not unmanagable at all. I can study in my room or whatever. While I wouldn’t ideally choose to live here post-freshman year, it’s been great as a freshman. I don’t regret picking Warren at all.</p>
<p>If you want the best FRESHMAN experience, I would suggest trying out Warren or West. I do agree that West is out of the way if you’re a CAS/SMG/Sargent/SED/ENG kid though…unless you are an athlete or cannot bear being 15 minutes away from Allston. I do have friends from the schools above who live in West though. They adjust and don’t mind it overall. Generally, you grow to at least like where you live as a freshman. If you do want a quieter but still somewhat social atmosphere, Towers is definitely an option too. If you’re in HoJo as a freshman, you generally are placed in a triple. Except for the AC & private bathrooms, I don’t see too much of an advantage. My friends who live there don’t have much more space per person in their triple (really double sized room) than I do here.</p>
<p>I find sharing the bathroom with my floor horribly inconvenient so I applied for Hojo. Most places charge you extra for having a private bathroom, but Hojo doesn’t. I like having my bathroom in my room so I can leave my things in there. The downside is that you have to clean the bathroom yourself. The rooms are big if you can get on the 7th floor. It has the biggest rooms. Floors that are even numbered (2, 4, 6) have lower ceilings than odd numbered floors (3, 5, 7). The second floor has doubles and singles but if you’re a Freshman they’ll definitely stick you in a triple like Lauren said. But since the beds are lofted it can save a lot of space. You can bring your bed down if you really don’t have a lofted bed, though.</p>
<p>I didn’t want to live in Towers or Warren because I didn’t want a social dorm. I don’t know if all the floors there are like this, but my friend’s floor at Warren could definitely get noisy. At Hojo people hardly made noise and I liked that. Heck, I don’t even talk to my neighbors. Everyone has their doors closed and keep quiet all the time. But OP, it really depends what you want out of a dorm. If you’re looking to make friends with all the people in your dorm, I wouldn’t suggest Hojo. From my experience, a lot of people keep to themselves. But it could also be because most are upperclassmen.</p>
<p>Warren doesn’t seem that bad from the videos I saw, but how are the bathrooms there? I know this may seem weird, but I am extremely picky in terms of bathrooms. I’d rather live farther away with less public bathrooms than somewhere central with a common bathroom…</p>
<p>On each co-ed floor, there are two bathrooms (one boys & one girls). The girls bathroom on my floor has three stalls, lockers, five (or maybe six?) sinks, and three showers. I think the boy’s side has only two showers.</p>
<p>There are also bathrooms downstairs near the lobbies.</p>
<p>I mean are the bathrooms…clean and hygenic most of the times?</p>
<p>i don’t have a chance to read all of this now, but quick questions…are there any others besides hojo with private bathrooms [kind of important for me]? where are the locations of each [specifically looking for ones close to the CAS buildings]? how do u guys feel about triples? does each room come with a desk/enough room if i’m an in-room kind of studier? what would ya’ll recommend for an initially-shy person [would hojo really be hard for me to make friends in]?</p>
<p>haha, sorry for all of my questions/if these were already touched upon.</p>
<p>Eytukan, the cleaning ladies keep them pretty clean most of the time. During weekends, it’s not uncommon that someone pukes all over the stalls or sinks. Depends on what floormates you get. At the beginning of the year the bathrooms could get quite messy, but soon enough everyone realized that this is now our home and we should keep it liveable, so things got a lot better.</p>
<p>Back home, I had my own bathroom and I could’t imagine sharing a communal bathroom with 20 girls, but I got over that waaaay quicker than I’d imagined.</p>
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<p>The brownstone buildings have kind of private bathrooms. You share with your floor, with is only about six people I think. And the bathrooms look like any bathroom you’d see in someone’s house instead of locker-room type bathrooms. The brownstones are on Bay State Road but the closeness to CAS depends on the brownstone you get into and some of them even have kitchens, but I don’t know which ones. Hojo is very close to CAS. I always leave 10 minutes before class starts and always make it there on time. Triples come with enough desks for everyone. In Hojo, the beds are lofted so your desk is under your bed. I like it because it’s all my space and nobody ever touches my things or has a reason to come into my area. Hojo…I think you’d have to put effort if you want to make friends with someone besides your roommates. It’s not like Warren or Towers were you can meet social butterflies and hang out with various people. In Hojo everyone basically keeps their door closed and it’s quiet at all times. Great for studying but bad for making friends. It’s also mostly sophomores and juniors with a few Freshman. Usually they try to put you with people of your class but sometimes a freshman gets stuck with upperclassmen.</p>
<p>also guys, don’t forget, if you have a noisy/messy floor, there are RA’s on every floor that you can talk to and will regulate this sort of stuff.</p>
<p>hey i was wondering if filling out the housing application would be my statement of intent to register… or are they two separate things? because i can’t commit yet but i want the best dorm i can get.</p>
<p>To submit I believe you also need to put down a $600 deposit and there’s no refund.</p>
<p>How many people are there per floor in the Warrens?</p>
<p>44.</p>
<p>4 singles, 1 quad, 18 doubles.</p>
<p>Also make sure to check this guide out:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.bustudentunion.com/upload/backdoor.doc[/url]”>http://www.bustudentunion.com/upload/backdoor.doc</a></p>
<p>Holy…44 people per floor??</p>
<p>So should an initially quiet person like me, who likes their own privacy and space, fit ok in Warren? I’ve asked everybody I know in school for their opinion, and told me to stay out of Warren. But I’m still keen on making friends, and I’m afraid that living in quieter dorms will limit my opportunities.</p>
<p>Warren or Towers is not where you want to live if you want quiet. If you want quiet, go to another dorm. Even the brownstones are not always quiet. Some brownstones have very thin walls so you can hear <em>everything</em> people do in their rooms. If you want quiet and privacy, pick a different dorm. There’s no reason you can’t make friends with your classmates you know.</p>
<p>All-girls floors in Warren are generally quiet, so that might be the best of both worlds for you (given that you’re a girl?)</p>
<p>If you’re shy and introverted, Warren might be the place to help you get over that… You might end up loving it. I also pefer privacy & quiet and I still love Warren, it’s not as extreme as people make it sound.</p>