<p>I’ve followed this discussion with some interest, mainly because I’ve never had this problem. I’ve lived in three dorms and visited many others in my university and they were all symmetrical with just a few exceptions. One was a huge double and I think the occupants had moved the furniture around. The other was actually my own - the beds were bunked when I arrived, and one desk was under the window. The beds in that dorm are usually unbunked (it’s symmetrical that way) but it’s extremely cramped, and bunking gave us more floor space, so we left it.*</p>
<p>I’ve arrived first once and arrived second once (once we moved in at the same time… kind of a long story). Each time, it was first come first serve, and it really didn’t matter. (I took the top bunk and the desk by the window - roommate wanted bottom bunk.)</p>
<p>Honestly, while I admire the intention behind Harvard’s policy, it seems much better as a policy to make sure that rooms are set up so it doesn’t matter who picks first, and leave the students to figure it out. I travel 9935 miles to get to school, and the last thing I want to do is hang around waiting for my roommate so we can pick one of two sides of a symmetrical room. I just want to put my sheets on and sleep.*</p>
<p>I think there’s another factor, too - after freshman year, most people pick who they want to live with, so move-in day may not be setting the tone for the relationship but vice versa. If I knew I had a Sheldon Cooper roommate I might wait… Since I knew my roommate would be okay with it, I went ahead and set up my side of the room.*</p>
<p>What schools are your kids attending that one side of a dorm room is so vastly different from the other? I’ve done move in days about 10 times now and none of them have been ‘wait for everyone’ type days. It was all first come first serve and it’s never been an issue between the mature young adults we’ve helped move in or roommates they have had over the years. </p>
<p>Back in the dark ages when I was in college, I was on campus 2 weeks before any roommates and there was no way I was going to wait to move my stuff in until they got there. The rooms were all identical anyway so does it really matter if you have the left side of the room or the right side?</p>
<p>At schools with older dorms, the rooms are not necessarily the symmetrical cube style. Frequently they are suites with more occupants than envisioned. Freshman year, my suite had two tiny bedrooms and a common room. One bedroom had a bunk bed and one was a single with a bed and desk. Not identical options.</p>
<p>My brother’s freshman suite was designed for one occupant. A sitting room, with a single bedroom and a bath off the bedroom. It was turned into a double (probably 100 years ago) by adding a bed and desk to the sitting room. My husband lived in suites of that design for a few years, too. They are called “walkthrough doubles.”</p>
<p>So if you “don’t see what the big deal is,” it might not be a big deal everywhere. But sometimes it is.</p>
<p>A family friends daughter goes to Harvard. They drove from far away and 3 of them had to wait for the 4th to show up, who came, threw stuff down, and disappeared for another 8 hours out shopping and to eat and who knows what. The rest of them sat around there waiting and waiting for her. That 4th didn’t deserve the courtesy.</p>
<p>What do you value more - the diligent or the dominant. The person who is truly dominant will get their way whether they show up first or second. </p>
<p>I don’t know if we’ll be first or second to the dorm, they space out arrival time. However his expected dorm is equally split so it truly doesn’t matter. I hope if we arrive second the person has just started settling in.</p>
<p>Both of us kids have lived in college dorm rooms since they were 12 to attend various summer programs. Even in a very plain vanilla room, there is usually a better side, very surprisingly most of the time furniture are not arranged in the most efficient way. When the girls allowed us, H has managed to help them re-arrange the furniture and make the room seem bigger. More than once, other people have come into our kid’s room to view their room’s configuration.</p>
<p>I don’t think roommates need to wait for each other before they unpack, because after all, if they are not happy, they could certain move the furniture around later. People rearrange their furniture at home all the time. </p>
<p>I think singles are priceless, having a roommate is over rated. When we are all grown up, the only person we need to share a room with is our partner, and there isn’t that much to compromise there.</p>
<p>Based on our family’s experience with a son and a daughter, and a laissez faire dad and an, ahem, somewhat controlling mom I have three questions:
1-How often is this more of an issue for parents than for kids?
2-How often is this is more of an issue for females than males?
3-Is this more of an issue for kids who have never shared space before at summer camp or at an on campus summer program?</p>
<p>As I mentioned above, my kids have roomed with someone every summer since 12, and neither one has enjoyed their experience, both asked to have a single freshman year. D1 only had roommate once in college, and it was her best friend.</p>
<p>I think it’s likely to be the most problematic where the rooms are accommodating a different number of people than they were designed to accommodate. My daughter will be attending a school where all the rooms are more or less identical–the same size, the same furniture, the same configuration. They are 180 square foot doubles with built-in storage units for two people.</p>
<p>However, many of the freshman are in triples. Which means they’ve added a desk and a bed, but not another closet or dresser (those are part of the built-in unit). I think they loft one bed and put a desk under it, and the other bed is a bunk. </p>
<p>There’s really not an equitable division of space and resources possible in this scenario. You could luck into two roommates who don’t mind a top bunk, or two roommates who just don’t have a lot of clothing (more common with the boys, I guess).</p>
<p>But is it more of a problem for parents than for kids? I don’t know…my daughter spent the last four months on a top bunk in a quad room and wasn’t too happy about it. I think it would be a big issue for her to get a top bunk in her college dorm room.</p>
<p>I think it IS a problem for parents, though, because we don’t like to see our kids get the short end of the stick, and some sticks really do have a short end. My mother had seen the singles in my sister’s freshman suite get grabbed up by the grabby, so she walked into my freshman suite and PUT MY SHEETS ON THE BED IN THE SINGLE. I still cringe remembering this.</p>
<p>The college I attended also had a lot of very old, unequal rooming spaces, but the solution usually involved switching mid-year.</p>
<p>This thread brings back memories of one particular summer taking my 9-yo D to camp (where bunks were preassigned) and waiting for about 10 minutes for the mother of the girl in the lower bunk to move her 20+ pairs of shoes off my D’s bunk to no avail. Finally had to move the stuff myself to help my D make her bed. Same mother said she’d have to come back later with a portable closet for her D’s dresses!</p>
<ol>
<li><p>My younger son is not one to make waves, but his first impression of the roommate only increased by other behavior throughout the year. Personally, I am maddest at the architect who should have known better. (It’s a newish dorm and since it has two closets I think the dopey architect must have thought it was a double.) He did not expend any time complaining to me. He had no problems with his freshman year roommate and they did end up moving furniture around the room from the arrangement that it started with.</p></li>
<li><p>I think females tend to have more stuff so it can be more of an issue if the rooms are unequally divided and one ends up with more drawer or closet space.</p></li>
<li><p>My son shared a 6’x10’ room with his brother for the first eight years of his life and went to camp for three years where they squashed 10 kid and 2 counselors in a platform tent. I think he can share space.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I’ve spent reunion nights in those freshman dorms with one bunk bed and one single bed with two small bedrooms and a large living room. The beds are metal and you can’t unbunk them - it’s a stupid arrangement, but there is no obvious fair way to do the divisions. There’s plenty of room to dump the stuff and go explore campus if one of the roommates arrives later.</p>
<p>There is no way I would sit around and wait for a 4th roommate after she showed up and left. Did she even care? I don’t mean that as an insult–some people really don’t care that much about how the room is arranged, and it appears that she’s one of them. The others were sitting around fuming and it seems possible that she just didn’t care that much and figured she’d let them do what they wanted. </p>
<p>My kids have both spent summers in dorms–my daughter is in one now. This year they were in a new dorm with suites. Her room in the suite had 3 in it. Clearly designed for 2. Everyone got there around the same time, and nobody wanted a top bunk. They decided to unbunk all the beds. They were all raised so that the dressers can fit under them. It makes their room really really crowded. But since it’s a suite and they have a living room to hang out in, they seem to be managing. These kids are in their 3rd year together and they are all freind and chose to room together. My H hung around long enough to help with the bed-adjusting and such. But otherwise we left it up to them. Even at 14, she’s quite capable of packing up her own stuff. I don’t intend to help much when she’s 18 either. Besides, I’m sure there will be something I need to go out and buy. Always is.</p>
There are a lot of suites like this at Yale–my son’s freshman suite had three single bedrooms and one double. The school deals with this by preassigning the singles and doubles within the suite before the kids arrive. In the double, you may still have top bunk/bottom bunk issues, but otherwise they are pretty much the same.</p>
<p>One note: the idea that you will switch at mid-year is noble, but in my experience, it usually doesn’t happen because it’s too much trouble and people get used to their situation.</p>
<p>We lived further away than the roommates who got there first. To be able to get there as early as they did, we would’ve had to leave the day before, stay in a hotel, unpack the SUV at the hotel so it wouldn’t get broken into, and then repack the car. DH wanted no part of doing that. </p>
<p>The quad my son was in was one large room with 4 beds (2 singles and a bunk bed). The bunk beds could be unbunked, but that would leave very little floor space to move around the room. His “early roommates” also brought an extra bookcase and chair so there was no room to unbunk. One closet was a huge walkin adjacent to the in-room bathroom, which the early birds took. The other closet was a regular size closet that also had to fit in 2 dressers. </p>
<p>So…in the suites where the “grabby” ones get the single(s) and the others are left to the double(s), is the housing cost the same? That doesn’t seem right. If singles are chosen/assigned officially, then they usually cost more, right?</p>
At Yale, at least, they all cost the same. But even the doubles are pretty nice, and all the suites have a nice shared common room.</p>
<p>Can we all agree that the reasonableness of taking a particular bed/desk/closet before the roommate arrives varies depending on how clear it is that one is superior to the other? I mean, I agree that it’s outrageous for the first arrivals to take the single bedrooms and leave a bunked double for the late arrival. On the other hand, I can’t see any reason to wait before taking the left-hand side of a room with essentially identical sides.</p>
<p>I think that some of the unequal spaces in the very old residence halls were set up with one room for the young gentleman and a second for his valet.</p>
<p>I am glad someone mentioned the very uneven dorm arrangements at some universities–otherwise, Harvard’s policy suggests that the students are OCD Type-A’s who need to measure the space down to the square millimeter.</p>
<p>DD attended a camp at Dartmouth a few years ago and stayed in very old dorms. One arrangement had two rooms, so you had to walk through the first room to get to the second. The second room had a door on it, but also had the only closet.</p>
<p>FWIW, I spent jr and sr year living in my sorority house, which like all the others on the campus had been built in the 1920’s and featured wildly “uneven” rooms (including a few triples and a quad). We switched rooms every quarter - fall, winter and spring - in an attempt to try to equalize the situation. </p>
<p>And yes, I agree that the reasonableness is based on how “even” the room is. My D’s room was huge and even though her early-arriving athlete roommate got the “better” bed, it was totally fine either way. S’s room was essentially a tiny closet so it didn’t really matter that he got there before the roommate and chose a side; there was hardly enough room to turn around, and by the time the roommate got there, there was really no way two people could have moved in at the same time. We were literally dumping the suitcase contents on his bed and moving the suitcases out so that the roommate could even fit a suitcase in the room. We could not have had twins in more diverse settings - D in a huge, lovely room in a gorgeous 100-year-old dorm that was featured in a movie and looks like a European castle; S in a cinderblock dump that should probably be torn down!</p>
<p>No, I didn’t detect any competitiveness or selfishness on Move-In Day. I think Harvard’s policy is driven much more by the former case - that most of the rooms are very unequal in size and shape. This is because many of the dorm buildings are very old and were built before the concept of symmetrical mirror-image dorms rooms had been invented. </p>
<p>My daughter’s freshman dorm was built in 1720, and I’m convinced that her room, a small double on the top floor with a steeply-sloping ceiling under the roof, must have been originally designed as servants’ quarters - servants for the wealthy, young gentlemen of the 18th century who were lodged in the bigger rooms below. (That’s just my theory. I don’t know that to be the case).</p>
<p>I think that Harvard’s rule is understandable, but unreasonable. When people arrive by plane they are subject to the airline schedules. It is ridiculous to have people sitting around all day waiting for someone’s plane to land. PLUS-when people arrive from out of town they need to shop for stuff. You can’t bring everything on a plane. I say let the young adults work things out on their own.</p>