My son is also on a single sex hall, but many halls are coed.
When they updated Ihouse this summer, it looks to me like they blew out a hole in the wall between two singles to create a double.
I may be wrong about this, but I think North also has communal bathrooms.
“When they updated Ihouse this summer, it looks to me like they blew out a hole in the wall between two singles to create a double.”
^ I wonder why they did that - perhaps to fit more storage space in there?
Edit/update: or because they had more requests for doubles than available doubles?
There were communal (well, two nozzles in a stall) showers on each level of each BJ house some 50 plus years ago when girls had not yet enlightened the place. I do not recall often sharing that stall with a floor mate, though I was an early riser. But the probabilities must be much against it in any event. With ten or twelve rooms on a floor and allocating five minutes to each inhabitant for a shower (but, if my olfactory glands did not fail me, not all showered daily) amounts to small odds of intersection under the twin shower heads. Perhaps there was some tendency as well to shave first and shower later if a stall was in use. However, I doubt that standards of modesty were quite as severe then as now: All first years who did not pass the swimming test took a quarter of instruction twice weekly buck naked. Were the women similarly disencumbered? --I never had the guts to ask. Of course Plato famously approved naked co-ed exercises for all the young men and women of his ideal Republic. Sign me up! Allan Bloom has suggested that Plato was insinuating a sly joke which doesn’t bear repeating but can perhaps be imagined if you remember being a young male eighteen years of age.
Still do not understand consternation over the imagined hardship of the distance of i-house from campus. For two years I lived in an apartment on Dorchester and 61st, so had a walk of several minutes just to get to i-house before turning west to walk a few further blocks down 59th to the campus. I never thought of that walk as any sort of hardship - quite the contrary. I loved the first glimpse of the towers of Harper and Rockefeller Chapel and I loved crossing and then walking along the Midway. It expanded the mind and evoked the heritage of the mighty University one had improbably become a part of. When Thomas Hardy wrote (in “Jude the Obscure”) of young Jude Fawley glimpsing and being inspired by the distant towers of the Oxford-like university in that book, I knew the feeling. It would be a shame to miss that experience, repeated daily in all weathers.
"five minutes to each inhabitant for a shower "
More power to UChicago if it has implemented a magical system to keep a college student’s shower to five minutes. Since my college student moved to UChicago our household water and electricity usage has decreased by approximately half even with three of us remaining at home. Convincing a whole dorm of college students to take five minute showers is Nobel prize worthy innovation and environmentalists everywhere should rejoice.
@milee30 same here! Most notable for us is the salt tank for the (hot) water softening system. I was shocked to find it wasn’t empty after a month of usage once my Uchicago kid moved out.
They didn’t blow out any walls between singles. They repurposed lounges, computer labs, communal spaces, and extra-large RA rooms across all dorms to fit everyone in because of the over-enrollment issues. That is not unique to I-House.
Why on earth would they knock down walls between singles? That’s just wasting money for no reason since you aren’t going to be fitting any more people in.
And yes North has communal bathrooms. Every dorm does except Max & Stony.
@marlowe1 raises another good point - if living 10 minutes from the quad in I-House is so horrible, why are so many people moving off campus even farther away from the quad?
Hint: people don’t really care that much about distance, especially not 10 minutes
(Also @marlowe1, you may be interested to know that BJ bathrooms have just been renovated for the first time in decades, and now have a stunningly luxurious 3 showers per floor. But having lived on the floor with the worst ratio of people:showers in all of BJ, I can pretty confidently say that 2 showers was enough and no one had to limit their shower time)
Not only 3 showers per floor but individual lighting in each of the stalls. And they all had that nice new smell to them. BJ is looking very charming these days.
They really did open a doorway between two singles to create my son’s double in Ihouse. There are 2 doors into the hall, but one is sealed. The hallway numbers are removed for the sealed door. There are 2 windows and 2 heaters. I took a few screenshots of the room, from a video that I took, but I can’t seem to post them here. The room is a nice size.
My biggest problem with Ihouse is the 15 minute walk to dining, and all freshman pay the same dorm rate. The new dorms have dining halls attached. My son eats all 4 meals a day on the meal plan, and that is a lot of travel. At least once a day he goes up to North.
Many colleges these days offer tiered pricing for dorms. Maybe more people would choose to live in I-house, if there was a price difference. At least I’d feel better paying for the Uber eats or Tiffin Cafe, when it snows, if I paid less for the location.
This will only be an issue for one more entering class. They will open the new dorm, with an attached dining hall, for the entering class of 2020.
I House students will be able to get breakfast at Tiffin Cafe on their meal plan beginning in Jan. Looks like the petition worked!
You know, I was given a real hard time by a lot of you a few months ago for being unhappy with i-House for our freshman daughter. Now, UC says no longer does EA or ED or early deposit get you first dibs on prime dorms. And in January, I-House and Stoney get free breakfast meals in Tiffin Cafe. I guess those long walks and fewer resources for the same coin was indeed unfair…
Our kid had a good quarter but hated her room; she didn’t “get used to it.” Actually, she hates it even more as the weather gets brutal. She said a lot of girls in i-House found boyfriends in north, max and south, so they can spend the night with them for added convenience.
Call me old-fashioned but that’s a pretty trivial reason for shacking up. Someone’s values are on display, but I can’t say whose.
@coldbrew22 - how cozy for those I-House girls, since Max is all doubles, and North nearly so. Pretty sure my kids would prefer that lonely single over in I-House.
No gal wants to walk 0.7 miles home alone to the outskirts of campus at 2am after hooking up. Or a mile in knee deep snow in the morning to food and class. i-house is extremely unpopular so it was very uncool how I was attacked a few months ago for my valid concerns, which the university has conceded to. the previous housing “lottery” WAS a farce and it is not fair i-house families pay the same fees for a crummier experience.
North is majority non-doubles. Granted, most first years are in doubles, but the difference is meaningful and will make the difference between getting a double as a second year and getting a single as a second year (doubly so once second years are forced to live on campus).
And oh please - the most it’s snowed so far is like…two inches, and even knee deep snow is plowed pretty much immediately. So you’re never trudging through snow, unless you go out of your way to step in it (…which I wouldn’t blame you for doing, it’s fun).
It’s pretty presumptuous to assume that the change to housing priority (which isn’t a lottery, like, at all, not even a scare quotes “lottery” and the actual housing lottery remains unchanged) was because of parents whining about I-House. Deposit-based priority is something many, many people haven’t liked for a long time, and this change is almost certainly a function of ED2 rendering deposit date meaningless and yield climbing so high it’s hard to justify it anymore to get people to deposit. Perhaps someone pointed out to Dean Boyer that Harvard doesn’t use deposit date in deciding where to house students.
Well hopefully those I-House girls are hooking up with upper div students at North, right? Otherwise it might get a tad crowded. Also, who has to walk .7 miles home at 2 am afterwards? If late-night shuttle isn’t working, can’t the boyfriend at least call an Uber? What kind of animals are living over in North or Max P?
Guess S19 would be the uncool kid, since he would list I-House as one of his choices if accepted. Now with the housing priority change he might end up amidst the hook-up culture at Max or North! Ugh. There are worse things than being in the “uncool” dorm LOL.
I have seen some Lab Schools kids walking from 53rd to school everyday. Someone need to call DCFS for child abuse for making a high school kid walk .9 mile to school everyday. /strong sarcasm
I wonder how many undergrads in the old days were close to committing suicide when they had to walk from Shoreland to Main Quad every day.
Snarkiness aside, right now over half of the college population live off campus. So are the overwhelming majority of grad students. I think they adjust quite well living at over 1 mile away from the Main Quad.
I lived in I-House and walked to the quad every day. And in my crazy California clothes (including pointy thin leather Esprit shoes w/no socks, sweatshirt hanging off the shoulder, maybe a jacket from some thrift store . . . no coat). Made it through first quarter, although admittedly it was a tad nippy around 10th week.
^^ oh yeah, I had practically shaved my head right before showing up at UChicago so basically had no hair - and no hat.
My “uncool” kid likes I-House. She’s made some really close friends, loves her house, likes the charm of the building. She never complains about the walk (doesn’t have a boyfriend that I know of). She’s planning to stay next year too. And now breakfast without leaving the building!
My son absolutely adores Max P’s central location to everything and house culture. In a double last year and a single this year.
Almost all of his friends moved off, which is interesting that Boyer looked to lock in kids for two years for the class of 2023.
@fbsdreams To each his own. Some can’t wait to get off campus. Some want to stay on campus for four years.
IMHO U of C actually has a very compact campus. Compared to my undergrad school, every major building is within relatively easy walking distance. With the UGo Shuttle now the entire Hyde Park is just a bus ride away even at 2:00 am.