And how do we know they are not already stellar students? Why the assumption they may not be?
Students who put a lot of effort into styling their dorm rooms usually do it before classes start. I see no reason why it would interfere with their ability to be good students. I also see no reason why NOT styling your dorm room would interfere with your ability to be a good student. The two things are unrelated.
This points squarely to the real problem with this room: there is no closet. At all. That is why they have to have a wardrobe.
I find it incomprehensible to build living quarters with no closets. This isn’t the 17th century. I realize that it may enable them to squeeze in a few more rooms, but at what cost?
The items of furniture are all needed, but the design of the furniture for the room is very poor: it is oversized. But it is what it is.
I would put the bed along the window wall, the wardrobe and bookcase on either side of the door, and the desk next to the bed on whichever end he prefers.
Honestly, I do not think that every kid NEEDS a minifridge. I knew precisely one person in college who had one, and the all-hours availability of food on campuses is much greater now. This kid might need a fridge for medications. If so, he could get a cube-sized one and put it on top of the too-tall dresser.
The way the furniture worked in both of my kids freshman dorms was that the bed could be lofted using the dresser at one end of the bed as the support for one end and the desk at the other. The dresser faces in at one end and the drawers are then accessed under the bed, the desk is at the other end facing out. This may not work in the room shown if one of the walls is not long enough to sit at the desk at the end of the bed, and some kids don’t like to sleep in a lofted bed. My D was in a very small room, a double that probably should have been a single, and she also put her bookshelf on the other side of the desk so that she could access it under the bed to save some more room.
Best thing is to look at the room when you get there and see what the most efficient use of space is. It’s hard to tell from the video because of the distortion. Don’t remember with my S, but my D needed extra space for clothes, shoes, coats for the various seasons and also a fair amount of clothes and shoes for her sport.
The serious women students like myself didn’t spend time thinking about decorating (nor did we have the money). Men like my son treated college rooms as home- they never did anything at parents’ house either. My U was not into that sort of thing- seems like a holdover from southern debutant society and an era when girls went to finishing school and were being prepped for appearances.
My U installed room air conditioners for summer programs, including those run by various business school departments (eg for bankers, realtors) then took them out for the semester college students time. Today, unlike eons ago, they now have some air conditioned dorms (pay more).
^^^This^^^Made me chuckle. I can tell that you haven’t visited YouTube and searched for “dorm haul” or “dorm decor”. Back in my college days I spent a good amount of thought on my dorm decor, but my D21daughter took it to a whole other level because of the availability of social media inspration created for and by her generation. And its very possible to accomplish both academic excellence and interior design…not even sure what one has to do with the other. Kind of like it’s possible to excel at our jobs while looking stylishly fabulous 
Back in the day, my roommate and other on our floor did basic decoration, including hauling in a coordinating rug for the room. I’m serious but lively and look forward to doing my DDs’ rooms. I could totally do DS room now like a NYC bachelor loft on a low budget but he wouldn’t want all that. I’m just proving the essentials with a little style as a base for him. The only reason I’m not getting him a fridge from the start is because we are flying in and I don’t know if his roommates are locals who may bring one.
My daughter spent untold hours on Pinterest and in stores planning and decorating her dorm room. It made her a no less serious double engineering major.
@wisc75
You’d have fit right in with this aspect of my STEM public magnet HS student culture when I attended. The prevailing mentality among most students…especially the top quarter and some teachers was that if you prioritized room decor/looking stylish, that was time/mental energy which could have been put to far better use in academics/co-curricular activities. Especially among classmates who were aspiring academics or engineering/CS majors.
And one reason why this mentality is more common among males is partially due to negative peer pressure. Men who are clotheshorses or prioritize too much on being stylish/home decor tend to be suspected of lacking masculinity/machismo than those who don’t care nearly as much.
One older male roommate who was an extreme neatnik and decorated his room to the point there was much bright matching colors which caused several friends visiting my post-college apartment…including younger friends(millenials) to suspect the room belonged to a female roommate. It only registered when they saw him coming into the apartment and going into that room to realize that yep…that “overdecorated” room belonged to a male roommate.
The only truly unusual thing I see in this dorm room (other than that a freshman got a single, which isn’t common) is that instead of a closet, which is recessed, is that there is a wardrobe, which is a piece of furniture that takes up space in the room. This would be normal in an antique building, but is rather strange in an obviously modern dormitory.
But every dorm room needs a desk, chair, bed, dresser, bookcase and closet/wardrobe for each student. This is standard issue for most colleges. The challenge here is that in many rooms, you can shove a dresser into the closet to free up floor space, but in this case, there is no closet.
“This would be normal in an antique building, but is rather strange in an obviously modern dormitory.”
Sometimes these singles are former study cells that have been converted. That might be how you get a tiny room without a closet.
" This would be normal in an antique building, but is rather strange in an obviously modern dormitory."
I think OP said it’s Boss hall at CMU. IIRC it’s one of the original campus buildings which underwent an extensive renovation in the late 80’s which is why it looks like a modern building, but it’s still within the restrictions of the original structure. It may have undergone more renovations/changes since then that I’m not aware of, though.
@anomander, LOL! I think of a late 80s building as modern! (Maybe it’s because I am an antique myself!)
Wondering if this room is part of a suite with a common area. If so, it may be that the “bedroom” only serves for sleeping and storage with the majority of time spent hanging out with suitemates in the common area.
After spending an afternoon looking at dorm room floorplans and photos from my alma matter, it appears that the only thing I have found truly unusual about this room is the size of the dresser - all of the dressers in the photos I saw had two or three drawers and this one has five. Also, all of the rooms I saw for freshmen were doubles (except for one). The square footage per person comes out the same, but appears larger in a double when two people combine the open space. The one single room I saw was a suite arrangement with bedrooms surrounding a common area.
Not to self and future dorm residents - check out dorm floorplans BEFORE requesting a room if space is a priority.
At another university (not Carnegie Mellon), one of my kids lived for a year in a Civil War-era dorm that had been renovated in the 1980s. It looked modern on the inside but the rooms had wardrobes, not closets. Maybe retrofitting an old dorm with closets is inordinately expensive?
My single dorm room in UMiami’s 60’s era “modern” freshman building was walk-in closet sized with built-in furniture. I was just glad to get a single room in the housing lottery as a non-grad student. I remember being able to sit on the bed and touch the dresser/desk on the opposite wall. At least it had a nice window and good light. The grad student singles in other dorms were nice, with private baths.
I wouldn’t say putting closets in is inordinately expensive, but buying wardrobes is not only cheaper, but allows much more flexibility.
My first dorm at Mount Holyoke was built in the 1890s. It did have a closet, but the room was what they called a “temp double,” a single repurposed as a double to accommodate the rising enrollment after WWII. The temporary obviously had become permanent by the time I enrolled. The room was small, but not as small as the one the OP posted, and our furniture wasn’t as clunky. As the only girl in a family of boys, the worst part for me was getting used to sharing a room.
My son at Oberlin has lived so far in dorms that look like they were built in the 60s or 70s. They were very spartan, but did have decent closet space, which he used, even though his wardrobe is small. I think all the dorms I saw at Oberlin looked like they belonged in a gulag.
My daughter was assigned to the oldest, most run down dorm (gross carpet, moldy bathrooms, and an open pit outside that literally steamed all winter long) at Wellesley her first year, but when she saw her friends’ tiny rooms in the newer, nicer dorms, decided to sign up for the old dorm again the following year. I guess having a lot of space was more important than having a nicer room.
In my dorm single, the desk chair actually touched the bed. If you wanted to get beyond the desk to reach the dresser or the window, you had to climb over the bed to get beyond the chair.
I didn’t care. I loved my single and kept it for three years – from sophomore year to senior year. It was up in an obscure corner of a dorm that I shared with four other people, all of whom were good friends. It was one of the nicest places I ever lived. I cried on graduation day when I had to turn in my keys.
Space isn’t everything.
Our standards were so low. And even lower for off campus housing. Had to shower in an unheated basement in WI in the winter. You got very quick at it and at least the water was hot.