<p>My son is an EA admit and is seriously considering UChicago. </p>
<p>He's a suburban kid and he likes big cities. He will be a bio major and intends to do bio/genetics research when he gets there. He is social and adventuresome, yet he likes to be part of a close-knit community, but not at the exclusion of larger social scenes. He enjoys philosophical discussions and he breakdances.</p>
<p>I'd like to know what residential house folks here would recommend and why?</p>
<p>First, you don’t pick a “house”, you pick a dorm. With a couple of exceptions for relatively small, one-house dorms, the dorms all have multiple “houses”, and assignment to those is random.</p>
<p>Second, you don’t have a completely free hand to pick a dorm, either. You list your top three choices, and fill out a questionnaire that fairly obviously gets used to imply more choices if your top three are unavailable. Although if you were willing to send in the enrollment deposit now, chances are the top choice would be available.</p>
<p>Anyway, at this point I think there are only really seven choices for entering first-years, and something like 90% of them will be housed in one of the four largest dorms. I don’t think anything about any of them is fundamentally inconsistent with the qualities you describe. There have been lots of threads picking apart the differences between the dorms, but I suspect none of it amounts to a hill of beans as far as the most common options are concerned.</p>
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<p>Any differences between the dorms in terms of accommodations? Also, how do you sign up for the smaller dorms (the other 10%)? Do the dorms have different upperclassmen to underclassmen ratio?</p>
<p>They are almost all different accomodation-wise. You can look at the descriptions here:</p>
<p><a href=“http://housing/undergraduate_housing/[/url]”>http://housing/undergraduate_housing/</a></p>
<p>Some of the smaller and more highly sought-after dorms have more upperclassmen (i.e. Snitchcock), but in general they are all about the same. </p>
<p>The most important things for your son to consider are: distance from the main quads (and, most importantly, the dining halls), as he could be anywhere from literally right on campus (Max P, Snitchcock) up to over a mile away by the lake (Broadview); type of living accomodations, i.e. single/double, public/private bathroom, etc.; old, quirky, historical, lots of traditions (Snitchcock, Broadview, Breck, Blackstone, BJ, Pierce, Maclean), or new, clean, and modern (South Campus, Max P); and finally, the overall size of the dorm, ranging from 80 (Blackstone) to ~800 (South Campus). All the houses are about the same size, so dorm size really just dictates the size of your close, non-house community, because at some point he may get tired of his house. Also, on the distance thing, if he would be the type to like exploring the city of Chicago (I don’t know why you wouldn’t…), the dorms close to campus are not the easiest places to do so from, as there are no buses running from campus directly downtown. The best dorm for great access to the city is Broadview, as the 6 (bus that runs express downtown) and the 55 (bus that runs to the red line) both stop half a block from the dorm, and the Metra Blue Line (commuter train which runs downtown and to South Chicago/Indiana) is two blocks away.</p>
<p>Snell - smaller dorm right in the middle of campus</p>
<p>Also, you don’t exactly “sign up” for dorms. You put your top three choices and try to assign you accordingly while attempting to adhere to your questionnaire preferences. So if you want in one of the smaller dorms, put it as your top choice and hope for the best. Besides Snitchcock (nearly impossible to get into), the smaller ones generally aren’t difficult to get placed into.</p>
<p>The big choice points, as far as I can tell, are:</p>
<p>– Do you want to try to join the Cult of the True Chicago Believers (with mandatory Scav Hunt participation, supplementary intellectual activities, and a high incidence of pretentiousness)? That’s Snell-Hitchcock, and it’s really the only dorm with a unique character and a real four-year population.</p>
<p>– Do you really want a single and/or relative quiet? If so, you’re looking at B-J or the smaller off-campus dorms, and most of the time you will decide B-J is your first choice. You can probably take as long as you want to parse the relative differences of Maclean, Broadview, and Breckinridge. (Those dorms tend to accumulate a lot of ignorant folklore, standard fear-of-the-Other stuff, about how anti-social and incestuous they are. As far as I can tell – my kid lived in one, and a high school friend of hers in another – they are perfectly nice, friendly and social, with some great amenities. But they are rarely anyone’s first choice.)</p>
<p>– Do you want a roommate and a crowd? Chances are your first choice will be either Max Pavlevsky (ugly, soulless, most central location, bathrooms in-suite) or South Campus (brand spanking new, a lot prettier, but farther from most things except the as-yet-unbuilt arts center, and apparently somewhat noisy), with Pierce as second or third choice (but it has its fans) depending on how much you care about being close to the gym and the 55 bus. (Pierce is not old, quirky, or historical. It is a Soviet-era highrise, with teensy doubles, and hence a very social atmosphere.)</p>
<p>There are other houses that field excellent Scav teams. B-J should beware. :D</p>
<p>@JHS- while some aspects of your other characterization of Snell-Hitchcock are pretty true, S-H Scav participation is by no means mandatory. Scav (specifically, Snell-Hitchcock) is fun enough to draw most of the dorm in to participating, but you’re by no means required to participate if you don’t want to- and trust me, there are S-Hers who go four years without. Trust me- in addition to my UChicagoPSAC hat, I was the S-H captain last year and am now a member of Team Judge. :)</p>
<p>Grace, you have no idea how cool I think that is! Being Snitchcock Scav captain, and then a Scav judge (which I guess is what retired Snitchcock captains do) – that’s like being president of the Harvard Law Review.</p>
<p>I am in the category of people who think that Scav is about the funniest thing going. My son does, too. He very reluctantly abandoned his dream of applying to be a judge this year because he has a project going on this spring that may keep him out of Scav altogether (which, I have to say, shows some maturity – last year he might have dropped the project because it would interfere with Scav). My daughter wouldn’t touch Scav with a ten-foot wicker phallus. She is in the category of people who wish it would drop off the face of the Earth, or at least stop disrupting FOTA. </p>
<p>I’ll take your word for it that Scav participation at Snitchcock isn’t strictly mandatory. But it has to take at least 100 people participating on a team to mount any kind of serious effort, much less win about as often as the Jordan-era Bulls, and Snitchcock doesn’t have that much more than 100 people. Especially since the judges can’t help. (Or can they . . . ? Opinions seem mixed on that.)</p>
<p>Kudos!</p>
<p>JHS,
Breck had about ten people on their team last year and got some really nice kudos from the judges for how much they accomplished. Of course, none of them slept for that week…but my mom got S1 two bars of caffeine soap to help with that this year!</p>
<p>Soap? Unless the Breck Scav team is all girls, I can’t imagine how soap would contribute anything. I spent Judgment Day with a large Scav team two years ago, and I can assure you that none of the boys had so much as looked at a bar of soap since the morning before it began.</p>
<p>(By “serious effort”, I meant trying to win, which essentially requires making at least some effort on 400+ items, some of which are very involved.)</p>
<p>I understand they sent people off to the showers at various points to wake them up for the next bout of items on the list. S figured caffeinated showers would be helpful. 
Will have to ask how many items Breck’s team got through.</p>
<p>I have a family member at U of C, living in Pierce, and she loves it. Yes, the rooms are small, but well organized, and cozy once the two roommates settle in. Because of the way the dorm is set up, the House lounge is very central and it seems as if students spend a lot of time there. My family member says her House in Pierce is very “tight” with each other and she chose to continue to live there a second year. Personally, she feels that the House lounge set-up in Pierce is much better than Max Pavlevsky for people getting to know each other.</p>
<p>She says the food in the Pierce dining hall gets boring, but, on the other hand, the dining hall is right in the building, so she doesn’t have to venture out on cold winter days just to have breakfast.</p>
<p>Her floor has a coed bathroom, and she says it’s not a big deal at all.</p>
<p>Pierce is VERY close to the library, the athletic facilities, and most of her classes.</p>