Life in Exploratory Dorms

Student Lounge College Life
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Hi all,

At my university, I will be a new freshman starting this fall, and I will be staying in a primarily “exploratory” dorm for undeclared majors. However, I already have a major (architecture) and strongly consider it to be the most important thing in my college experience — therefore academics are essential to me. The only reason I’m staying in this exploratory dorm for undeclared students is because my roommate, whom I had met previously, is undeclared and so he must live in this dorm. In order to remain his roommate, I’d need to stay in this dorm too — which I’m fine with. But, my question is this: not to sound all pompous or elitist or anything, but do you think that an exploratory dorm might feature less academically inclined kids? Do you think a very focused student like myself might not fit in in a dorm like this? Why or why not? Thank you for all your input.

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You’ll be fine. There will be all sorts of students in every dorm, even honors ones. That’s part of the experience and imho one of the best parts of living in the dorm.

FWIW, the strongest “academically inclined” people I know came in underclared—it has absolutely no relation on how seriously they take academics or how much they value education. Especially at a school where freshman mostly take general education classes (most likely yours), having a chosen major isn’t really the most important thing.

That said, an architecture dorm will have kids who are only majoring in architecture because their parents want them to, only majoring in it because it’s easy, don’t want to be in college at all, and kids who can’t wait to change. I guarantee it.