<p>Does the off campus apt have basic furniture, like bed, desk, chair? Or you have to buy everything?</p>
<p>South was the dorm he didn’t like. It really is poorly designed, but not too awful if you aren’t on the top floor.</p>
<p>My older son got to stay in his freshman year room at Carnegie Mellon - since it was a full size one bedroom apartment as long as you didn’t mind the walk (about ten minutes from the center of campus) it was fantastic.</p>
<p>Off campus apartments are like renting anywhere else - some landlords provide furniture, some don’t. It’s not uncommon for previous residents to sell their furniture (especially if they’re graduating) but furniture isn’t hard to come by on TuftsLife, Craigslist, or at Ikea</p>
<p>Dogersmom,</p>
<p>I find your perspective fascinating, because it is very different from mine.</p>
<p>I want to note that the dorms as well as the clusters of houses adjacent to the Tufts campus actually do have personalities. Unless the housing departments of colleges with house systems have access to a Potteresque sorting hat, then it is not clear to me that a system that assigns students to a house and lets the students who like the house stay and replaces those that dont via a lottery will develop a personality any more strongly than a system that has students select their dorm each year based on a lottery.</p>
<p>Ultimately, I think that a certain set of living attributes is likely to attract a certain type of person.</p>
<p>I think the primary difference is that the Tufts residential system supports and encourages a more diverse set of living experiences than a school with a pure house system. The result is a student body that tends to identify more strongly with a group of friends than a particular building and a view that the college housing experience consists of a series of different growth stages rather than a singular experience.</p>
<p>In the Tufts culture, the attributes of your roommate(s) are thought to be more important than the attributes of your room.</p>
<p>Due to a number of factors (including the graduating class-based priority scheme in the lottery), Tufts dorms tend to be stratified by graduating class. The all freshman dorms have layouts that favor in-dorm socialization over in-dorm studying/sleeping. The mixed class dorms shift the balance more toward studying/sleeping. The upperclassman dorms and university owned houses facilitate smaller group socialization and more independent living (i.e. suites and apartments, some with no RAs). </p>
<p>The clusters of houses adjacent to the campus that are not owned by Tufts are actually considered (by students) to be part of the Tufts community (more on this later). These houses represent the pinnacle of independent (i.e. real-world) living. They also facilitate integration with the work force by providing a place to live while interning/working/studying at one of the many local companies/labs/hospitals/non-profits/universities over the summer (which many Tufts students do).</p>
<p>At Tufts, groups of friends are formed freshman year based on a set of common interests and travel through the various stages of the four-year housing experience together . This tends to strengthen the bond. Junior year the groups tend to fragment as members experience living/studying abroad, but they re-form senior year, often in a shared living arrangement with an even more diverse set of living experiences to share. </p>
<p>It has been more than 30 years since I graduated and my group of college friends had a get together at the end of last summer </p>
<p>Here is some information on the Tufts housing lottery</p>
<p>:<a href=“http://ase.tufts.edu/reslife/documents/lotterySelection13-14.pdf[/url]”>Residential Life & Learning | AS&E Students;
<p>Mastodon - I appreciate your perspective on this. I guess it depends on what type of person you are. I was quite content to spend much of my time in college in my room (by myself) studying . . . secure in the knowledge that I had friends merely by the fact of being a resident in Dorm X. If I’d been a student at Tufts, I think I would have had a much more difficult time . . . without a close circle of friends, I would have been at a loss to find housing that felt so much like “home.” And returning to school after an extended leave of absence (as I did), I think I would have felt especially isolated.</p>
<p>So, for the student who’s less outgoing, perhaps Tufts isn’t such a good fit. But for the student who makes friends easily, and is ready to become more independent, Tufts may be a much better fit than a small LAC where everyone lives in dorms for all four years. Even at my college, where students had a choice of several really beautiful old residence halls, there was no shortage of juniors and seniors eager to relocate to the school’s on-campus townhouses and apartments. And there are even more apartments available at the college now than in my day . . . so I guess the two schools have more in common than I realized!</p>