What are the dorms like for freshmen? Are the floors and bathrooms coed? How relaxed are the RAs? Which building is the best?
- Depends on the house
- The floors are single sex, along with the bathroom
- Depends on the RA. They're students(Sophomore, Juniors, Seniors)
- Can't really say for sure, but Hank and Stambaugh are known to have good rooms.
Freshmen dorms are the nicest on campus, other than new kissam. Even the older houses are nice compared to what exists for upperclassmen. Floors and bathrooms have a single sex that alternates as you go up, so there will be a floor of guys, then a floor of girls, etc. RAs are a mixed bag. Most of them are pretty relaxed though in my experience. They tend to choose people who are nice and personable for the freshmen RAs. The new buildings (hank, stambaugh, murray, crawford, and sutherland) are generally considered “best” when compared to the older buildings (east, west, north, gillette, memorial). Like I said, the older ones are still nicer than upperclassman dorms, so I wouldn’t worry about it so much.
Most of the dorms are nice, especially the new buildings. As long as you aren’t in Gillette(an old building with tiny rooms) you should be fine. Even the old buildings have been renovated recently, so their interior looks new when compared to the old dorms on main campus.
As far as RAs go it definitely depends. MY RA freshmen year was very chill. I personally knew an RA who never wrote anyone up and even had small pregames in his room(Commons is officially dry). Most aren’t that relaxed but I’d say most are pretty nice and caring but there are a few who are jerks. You should be able to figure out how chill your RA is pretty quickly.
Are the upperclassmen dorms that bad?? What are the best upperclassmen buildings then? What’s so bad about them?
Upperclassmen dorms are fine. They’re just old, like from the 1960s and earlier, and what you would expect from the the typical idea of a college dorm (white block walls, wooden dressers and beds, everything just kind of old, brutalist architectural styling that makes the outside look like the projects). Kissam is the newest upperclassmen dorm so it’s the nicest (just as good if not nicer than the newest commons houses), and new vandy barnard will be nice when it’s finished.
It’s not that the other dorms are bad, I would say that they are your average college dorm. It’s just that all of commons is especially nice, especially if you care about how the exterior of the building looks and living on a nicely manicured quad. I just wanted to pre-empt the whole yearly cycle where incoming freshmen freak out about living in the older “bad” dorms, which seems silly from an upperclassman’s perspective since they’re still really nice, especially compared with most other dorms.
The best upperclassmen dorm is definitely Kissam. The worst dorms on campus are on Alumni Lawn. Their exteriors are nice, but inside is a different story. They have major problems with mold, with the worse cases being found in Vandy Barnard. Thankfully, VB is being demolished and a Kissam-like residence hall is being constructed in its place. I’ve also heard that there are plans to demolish Towers (a group of four ugly project-like high-rises). I’m not sure when this will happen as Zeppos has been talking about it since I was a freshman.
^According to Zeppos, Towers could be torn down in the next five years. I heard elsewhere that Towers is next in line to be demolished.
Zeppos really wants to bring down towers, but I don’t seen that happening until maybe five years from now. He started talking about it back in 2012 and it was supposed to be next after kissam, but vandy barnard jumped ahead of it. Vandy barnard will take two years to build, then they’ll probably have two or three years in between, then maybe they’ll bring down towers. I’ll be interested to see how they handle it because towers houses 1200 students, so almost an entire class. The new dorms each only have about 100 more beds than the original places did, so they can’t stick all of those people in there. Maybe they’ll do one at a time.
@Vandy93 Are towers better than the singles on Alumni? I’ve been told Tolman is better than Towers
I think Zeppos has been planning on tearing down Towers since he first became chancellor. It’s nice that he put a timetable on it. Hopefully he gets it done. They are a huge eyesore. As far as what happens to housing I think when they knocked down dorms in the past they have converted some double rooms into triples and let more people live off campus.
@Suffer Personally I’d take a single in Towers over a single in Tolman. I don’t think there’s that big of a difference in terms of size and both buildings are rather old but Alumni has a mold problem. I think the worst case was in VB, but I’ve heard stories about mold and flies in the showers of some of the other buildings on Alumni, etc.
Tolman’s ok. As far as quality of the actual rooms, it and towers are probably the same. It’s probably quieter and less people you know will live there though. I actually kind of like towers in a way. Even though it looks like the NY projects, it is so quintessentially “college ugly” and it’s such a big component of the Vanderbilt experience in a way. Pretty much every person who has gone to the school here has lived there, and it’s got pretty much everything you need since it’s close to classes, right on west end, near rand, and so many of your friends, acquaintances, and peers live there.
@fdgjfg : It seems Vanderbilt actually has a lot of open space. Isn’t it possible to just build a new complex accommodating those folks and then demolishing the towers (which yes, may take over 5 years)? The only problem may be how that affects the tree canopy, but other than that, it isn’t impossible.
@bernie12 Vandy does have some open space on campus where construction could take place but I think Zeppos(who cares deeply about the aesthetics of campus) wouldn’t want to build on any of the green spaces large enough to house a new complex(like Alumni Lawn). He’d much prefer to let more people live off campus and convert doubles into triples. Vandy is expanding its boundaries (see http://www.tennessean.com/story/money/real-estate/2015/09/24/vanderbilt-buys-corner-pub-midtown-site-25m/72754326/) so it could be possible that they build a new dorm off main campus sometime in the future.
@Vandy93 : Many schools get it such that graduate students and undergraduates living in certain condos or apartments near campus get discounts (basically a sort of subsidy). These places tend to be in more suburban areas though. And yes, interesting article. I forget how geographically small Vanderbilt is. My school actually has the same issue (cares a lot about the aestetics and now protecting the heavily forested areas) and has resorted to demolish and then in-fill. The space that would not affect any heavily wooded areas has essentially been maxed out, It makes every major construction project a huge pain. We of course didn’t really have any true lawns like Vandy…more like wooded areas, courtyards, and plazas. Such limited space to work with.