I am an accepted student to UNC’s biology major, but I have no idea what housing option to take! What housing has the best social life? Which one has the best rooms/ bathroom options? What housing is closest to the biology department (where I’ll be taking most of my classes). Also, what are the benefits of living in North/South/Mid campus? What are the different “communities?”
Please let me know. It would be a lot of help in my deciding for housing!
Thank you so much.
FWIW, here is an excerpt from a thread last year that addressed the question “Granville Towers vs. South Campus”:
“I lived on South my first year and the walk is not nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be. I have heard numerous freshmen that lived at Granville complain about a feeling of social isolation. It’s also not that much nicer than a well-maintained, newer dorm like Koury/Hardin/Horton, to be totally honest. If it was me, making the decision with the info I know now, I would never ever pick Granville as a freshman. Especially because there is a LOT of construction going on right now, that I am not sure would be done by the time you come in the fall. Definitely go with South Campus; it’s kind of a freshman rite of passage, lol. You want Koury or Hardin or Horton or the other one (you’ll know what I mean looking at a map; there are four identically shaped buildings all together on South). Hinton James (aka HoJo) is a high-rise dorm and a nightmare when the elevators go out (not that that is often or anything) and just generally has a bad rep, as it is also the farthest from everything.”
In terms of distance, while the South Campus residence halls are farther away from most of the academic buildings (although closer to the Dean Dome, if that is important to you), there is the P2P bus service which if pretty good about getting you to the other parts of campus and Franklin Street. It also seems that the South Campus residence halls have a good bit of esprit de corps; and if you live on South Campus you will eat most of your meals with other first-year students, whereas if you live on North Campus, there will be many more upperclass students where you eat (although that may or may not be important to you).
Some residence halls have rooms off a corridor as opposed to suites. What I was told last summer at the first-year orientation by someone from the residence hall office is that no university cleaning service will be provided unless the restroom can be accessed by the cleaning staff without going through student rooms. To put it another way, not all suites are created equal in regards to cleaning services: if you are in a suite of rooms off a corridor that connects the common restroom with the outside door (such as at Hinton James a/k/a “HoJo”, Craige, or Ehringhaus), then bathroom cleaning services will be provided by the university; otherwise, the students will have to clean up their own bathrooms (because the university doesn’t want to have cleaning staff going through students’ rooms in order to get to the restrooms). I don’t know about the North Campus residence halls, but this was why my first-year student chose to live in a place such as HoJo/Craige/Ehringhaus rather than some of the other residence halls on South Campus. So if cleanliness (yours and/or your suitemates) may be an issue, the type of physical room arrangement is something that you might want to think about.
When you attend a first-year orientation session in the summer, there will be an opportunity at that time to tour a “model” room at a South Campus residence hall, so you and your parents can see what it looks like. Here is a link to first-year housing information, if you haven’t seen it: http://housing.unc.edu/future-residents/first-year-students