<p>It seems like just yesterday our son was anxiously awaiting for his EA decision like so many are right now. Hard to believe it was a year ago. Just wondering, for those of you who are now freshmen with just one month left in your first semester at ND, how is it going for you? What are some of the things you have been surprised by, disappointed in, discovered about yourself? What has been the most difficult adjustment to make? And your favorite things to do on campus? Would you choose ND if you had it to do over? Are you still thinking about the same major you had in mind when you went to ND? Have you discovered a new passion or interest?</p>
<p>Bad: Far more drinking than I expected. Plenty to do, but most people at events seem to have partied before showing up. Wish they had substance free dorms like other schools - tired of the smell of vomit and loud parties during the week. A friend has the roommate from hell and no chance of a new one till next year due to school policies.
Good: Classes are good, admin/advisors/support staff are excellent. Very well-run school. Have made good friends, gotten involved in activities. Very interesting classes, some very motivating professors.
Would choose again to go here. My expectations would be more realistic, however. Just expected Notre Dame students to be better behaved than other schools.</p>
<p>Bad: I second the drinking. Also, parietals are a drag! I think it’s ridiculous that if I want to have my boyfriend visit, I have to go through the trouble of trying to find a guy friend to let him crash with (so much harder than you would think!). Also, I’m not a huge fan of the way the administration seems to baby us in some ways (parietals) and totally disregard policy in other ways (drinking).
Good: I have made a lot of great friends, the campus is still just as beautiful as it was when I first visited, my professors are great, and there are a lot of fun things to do.</p>
<p>
Very well. I love it here.</p>
<p>
Haven’t discovered much about myself, I’m basically still the same person. As for the school, there are a ton of great people here, from the students to the professors, though I was disappointed by how much of an ass Father Jenkins (the president) is.</p>
<p>My professors are all great, and I like all of my classes (they’re even at good times). I’ve heard bad things about a few of my friends’ professors, but that’s the exception, and if you take two lab sciences in one semester, you’re probably going to have a pretty bad schedule, time-wise. Engineering seems pretty work-heavy, but several of my friends are in engineering and still go out on weekends. Also, I don’t think architecture majors ever leave Bond Hall.</p>
<p>My roommate is great, we’re good friends. I was assigned to an 8-man common room, and I basically just had a bunch of instant friends from day one. We spend most of every day together and go together to various events. I also have a bunch of friends from other dorms, and during frosh-o there are a bunch of events with dorms of the opposite gender, so you’ll likely have friends of both genders from the first weekend, so don’t worry about the single gender dorms.</p>
<p>As for drinking, yeah, most people do, but it’s very low pressure (no one is trying to force you to drink, and I’ve never seen anything but respect for those saying no). A lot of the dorm parties suck, especially if you don’t drink, but you can either find better parties or host them or just get together with some friends. As someone who doesn’t drink (and has no problem with those who choose to; i.e. all of my friends), I can say that you shouldn’t be worried about the social scene, even if you don’t drink, unless you despise alcohol and all who imbibe it. The biggest problem with alcohol, I’d say, is that it usually leads to a couple reported sexual assaults per weekend. A noticeable minority of guys here have no respect for women and are just out to take advantage of them. It is a college, religious or not.</p>
<p>Parietals aren’t as bad as they seem; 2am on weekends is pretty late, and every dorm has a large 24-hour space with no parietals, so they don’t stop studying or talking or hanging out. Also, it’s fairly easy and common to break parietals, especially in male dorms (my rector warned us against breaking them in female dorms). There’s a guy in my section who does it every weekend night. Basically, parietals are there to make sure that after 12am or 2am (depending on the night) everyone is able to get to sleep, and not have to be kept up by the parties.</p>
<p>While I like most of the people here I should say that as someone from the lower/working-class, I find that the political biases here are against mine and that virtually everyone else is upper-class, which is kind of disappointing. Notre Dame is not the best place for diversity, especially economic. Members of the bottom 25% of America make up only 4% of Notre Dame students.</p>
<p>
I only use my room for sleeping (I’ve got the smallest room on campus, and it’s a double), everything else I do in more or less public areas (common rooms, dorm spaces, library, student center). It was a little different at first, but it’s basically hanging out with my friends 10 hours a day, which is great.</p>
<p>
Hang out with my friends in our common room, go to dorm events (mattress races, pepper eating contests, section sports, history quiz bowls, et cetera), club events, and definitely sporting events (Saturday game days are great, with tons of stuff to do, then the game).</p>
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Most definitely.</p>
<p>
Yep, though now I’m considering a couple minors or maybe a double major.</p>
<p>
I highly recommend the boxing team. You don’t have to know how to box to join, training is intense but fun (2hrs/day, 5 days/week), and there’s going to be the Bengal Bouts charity boxing tournament in February, which I encourage people to attend.</p>
<p>I stopped reading when I got to your incredibly disrespectful opinion regarding Fr Jenkins.</p>
<p>Bad: not a huge fan of these single sex dorms more because of inconvenience because it takes more effort to spend time with people of the opposite gender. doesn’t have to do with the drinking itself but the bathrooms are nasty after partying weekends which is only a problem because the cleaning staff doesn’t come in until monday. ND football is awesome but your saturday is literally gone because of football related activities. more diversity than i wanted economically/politically because there definitely are people from low income families here, maybe not from the lowest brackets but far from upper. as a strong conservative, i personally find people more liberal than i expected with some democrats around too, which i never expected to see. its cold! theres nothing really to do in the surrounding areas/people tell us how dangerous the REAL south bend is…</p>
<p>Good: the buildings are nice, everything is relatively close by, gym is nice, food is pretty good, constant landscaping keeps everything tidy, people are generally nice, the grotto is a great place to reflect/pray (i’m not even catholic), showers are surprisingly amazing quality with new tiles </p>
<p>yes i have changed majors from finance to either accounting/marketing but finance gives an impression of domination over the other business majors which sucks</p>
<p>nope, i wouldn’t choose ND again for sure. i think that i just did not get what i was looking for and had way too many differences with the people who live immediately around me in my hall. and i would say definitely do not come to ND unless its your first maybe even second choice. for me it was my seventh choice and i seriously cannot handle all of the pride from everyone here about how much they love this school and think its the best because i just cannot get myself to feel the same way</p>
<p>^So you’re saying that you’re unhappy about the amount of non-wealthy people here? Seriously?! From our class, over 60% of the families make over $100,000 per year… Where could you possibly find less economic diversity?</p>
<p>Where could you possibly find less economic diversity?</p>
<p>At many other highly selective colleges, it would appear. </p>
<p>“In 2008, the most recent year in the Chronicle’s data, a mere 6.5 percent of Harvard students received Pell Grants. And Harvard wasn’t all that unusual among elite colleges. At Washington University in St. Louis, only 5.7 percent of students received Pell Grants. At the University of Pennsylvania, the share was 8.2 percent. At Duke and Northwestern, it was 8.3 percent. At Notre Dame, it was 8.4 percent. The numbers at Yale (8.9 percent), and Princeton (9.9 percent) were also fairly low. The share at Stanford was 12 percent.”</p>
<p>[How</a> Elite Colleges Still Aren’t Diverse - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/how-elite-colleges-still-arent-diverse/]How”>How Elite Colleges Still Aren't Diverse - The New York Times)</p>
<p>Bad: Dorm rules. Parties are hard to host, though the terribly small freshmen rooms in older dorms don’t help anyways. </p>
<p>Good: Great activities. As Manorite said, boxing is great. I’m at least in great shape now, which is a bonus from what I used to be.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the responses. According to my son, his impressions are:</p>
<p>Good: Able to find group of friends with similar interests and faith level , opportunities to attend many interesting lectures and talks by guest speakers to campus, beautiful campus, smaller dorm setting is nice, like the weather now, some great professors, most professors thus far have been very willing to talk outside of class time</p>
<p>Bad: Having to encounter so many drunken, staggering zombies on the weekends, football weekends are so all consuming of time, not having enough time to participate in clubs or meet with friends more often because of homework, hate the weather the first 3 weeks of school, having second thoughts on being in Honors program because of workload, having to change my schedule 3 times at the beginning of semester to avoid Communist, anti-Catholic professors.</p>
<p>Would definitely choose ND again, it just gets tiring telling everyone ND is more than just football.</p>
<p>loveneweng:
At least the football talk is mostly positive this year - LOL!!
More seriously, do you think that the university will try to do anything more about the excessive drinking? As a parent, do you support having a few substance-free dorms so that people who choose to do so can get away from it? I mean, it would be a relief to escape it in what is now my “home.” It’s stressful, inhibits studying, and I can’t remember the last time I had a good night’s sleep (my roommate is quite the partier and the hall staff doesn’t seem to be able to do much more than take the ones who have really had way too much to the ER.)</p>
<p>I would absolutely support substance-free dorms and I know my son would also. In the interest of disclosure, when we travel to Europe, our son enjoys a glass or two of an adult beverage with dinner, so it’s not like we are tea totalers. We prayed that he would have a good roommate and our prayers thus far were answered. His roommate is reserved like our son and the only thing our son even mentions is that his roomie likes to game late into the night so sometimes he lays in bed listening to the rapid clicking of a mouse. He says to us “It could be so much worse, with partying and people in the room all the time” so he is thankful that is his only roommate cross to bear. He would absolutely be interested in a substance-free dorm. </p>
<p>When we Skype, I can hear all the ruckus going on in the hallways even during the weeknights. He always kept the door to his room shut, even in the hottest weather, to keep out the “roving masses”. He finds it disruptive and stressful also and worries whether it is going to get worse as the cold weather sets in or hopefully decrease with the end of football season.</p>
<p>For us, to be paying as much for tuition as we do at ND, and for him to have to deal with this, is truly a negative.</p>
<p>It is a shame that for some students who are at a different place in their lives, there is not a choice for on campus substance-free housing. </p>
<p>P.S.-one negative he told me I forgot to mention-Frosh O activities. He thought it was ridiculous that the 3 nights preceding the start of a freshman college career, students were kept up until at least 1:00 a.m. doing silly mandatory activities so that they were certain to start perhaps the most stressful week of their lives in a highly sleep deprived state. Of course, that is not exclusive to ND, it is at every school. It is just a shame society lowers its expectations of young adults so much.</p>
<p>I am also the parent of a freshman and have read this thread with interest. My child, who really enjoys nearly everything else about the university, expresses many of these same concerns. Child consumes an occasional beer, but finds the “drink till you puke” attitude disgusting. Child also has a heavy-partying roommate and is exhausted from lack of sleep which is beginning to affect grades. Rector and RA sympathize and agree that roommate is a problem, but say they have no options to offer.
Is there any way, as newdomer suggests, to imploy the university to make housing options available to non-abusing students? It works at other schools, would involve no additional cost (it might actually reduce housekeeping costs), and would make life so much better for many of the students. The dorms are now “home,” as has been said, and a student should have the right to a reasonably sane environment. I know the stated intent is to teach students to get along with people of other backgrounds, but I do not see how living with partying drunks is a life skill my child needs. Child stated recently that it appears the “inmates are running the asylum!”</p>
<p>Being the parent of a freshman, I do not know how much this issue (of substance free housing) has been discussed at ND before or to what extent. I am certain it would have to be initiated and pursued by the students themselves with the parents two cents added in for good measure.</p>
<p>I know our son would prefer to stay in on-campus housing for convenience sake but I don’t think he could stand it for 3 more years the way things stand now. We have even begun to look at alternatives for the future. He just likes being right in the middle of the campus so close to all his classes now.</p>
<p>Perhaps an experienced parent such as claremarie(whose views on these boards, I have always found to be wise) can enlighten us with her insight.</p>
<p>A friend, who has a senior at ND, shed light on the situation by saying that the dorms are the de facto frat houses of the school. Since there is nowhere else for the kids to party, that is where it has to happen. If you are trying to sleep, study, or just hang out with friends, it is like being in the middle of a frat party. You can’t leave the party and go home. There should be options, especially for the money being paid to attend the school. I (and child) prefer living on campus for safety as well as convenience.</p>
<p>I remember loud partying on Fridays and Saturdays, but it tended to just be guys roughhousing on weekdays. Partying tends to decline a bit after football as well. If you’re concerned about staying in the dorms, find a room mate with similar preferences to you and try to get in a section with your friends/upper classmen. They tend to go out to bars and only pregame in their rooms. I had trouble sleeping on weekends at first freshman year, but got used to the noise and had a quiet room mate.</p>
<p>I’d second boxing! I didn’t try it until my senior year, but it was one of the best experiences of my life!</p>
<p>Interesting responses. When I got to Notre Dame, I had no interest in drinking either. It did seem like a great deal of the social options manifested themselves as opportunities for unabashed alcoholism. I was fortunate to have roommates who didn’t drink, but I lived in one of the more party-friendly dorms. Unlike you guys though, this never really bothered me. If it got loud, I went somewhere quiet to study. I managed to find a good friend who felt the same way I did about drinking to live with my sophomore year. For two years, never had a drop and had a great time. One of my favorite things to do on the weekends was late night snow ultimate on the far north of campus. Eventually, after I turned 21, I did start drinking socially. I had a wonderful time at ND both before and after I made that decision. I think all those who feel stuck in bad situations with heavy partying going on all the time will figure out that this is just the most self-evident form of weekend recreation. There are tons of people out there who won’t touch the stuff and have a great time at ND. I hope you guys all find the solutions to your problems- ND became to me more home than where I grew up and I hope the same happens for you.</p>
<p>Interesting to read so many negative reactions to the drinking. DS #1 was fortunate to have a non-partying roommate, but as a varsity athlete discovered that drinking was the top priority at nearly all team social activities. That was a huge learning experience. He found three very compatible roommates to share a quad for sophomore and junior years, and now he has a single. DS #2 also was blessed with a roommate who doesn’t drink, and is thinking about forming a quad of like-minded friends for next year. I like the idea of a substance-free dorm but it is impossible to implement when, as a matter of law and school policy, all dorms are supposed to be substance-free. My sense from the experience of DS# 1 is that most of these problems with excessive drinking and incompatible roommates are resolved during or after freshman year, when students can choose their rooms/dorms/roommates, and a certain degree of maturity begins to set in. And your students may find that things settle down a bit after football season is over.</p>
<p>The dorms are not represented as substance-free since those who are 21 or older are allowed to possess alcohol. Substance-free dorms at other schools require that residents not possess the banned sunstances, and also not return to the dorm under the influence of the substances. Most people on this forum say that things change in sophomore year when you can choose your roommate and dorm. Those options don’t exist freshman year. Having substance-free dorms would attract groups of people with similar preferences and make life more pleasant and less stressful. I realize it will not happen, but it is a topic for discussion. BTW, compared to what I hear from friends at other schools, there is a lot less heavy drug use at ND which is a positive.
Football season is over and finals are getting near, so the focus will be changing for a lot of people. My current roommate is not coming back for spring semester (lots of issues) so maybe the new roommate be more compatible!!</p>