My daughter will be a freshman next year at the University of Chicago and is trying to decide which dorm to request. She is a private person, so she is considering BJ for a single but she is worried about being too isolated. Does anyone know what the social scene is like in BJ and if many students are in singles there?
Both @Lea111 and @JBStillFlying have DD living in singles at BJ this year. You can PM them directly. I presume you are new to CC. Here is a thread recently on housing for incoming students.
@Newton306 - my first-year D has a single in BJ and couldn’t be happier. It’s a great option because you can always leave your door open to socialize and people do pop in and out or take turns hanging out in each others’ rooms. She’s definitely trying to get a single again next year. I’m sure there are isolated students who aren’t doing things with their house, but that’s by choice, not because a dorm with a ton of singles is unfriendly. The house system should really help break the ice and they do a ton of stuff together right away during O-Week.
Yes, that’s right - my first-year DD has a single in BJ. She is very social but shy about meeting new people. After much research, BJ was her first choice, and that’s what she got. She ranked being in a double her HIGHEST priority on the dorm preference info sheet, because she was afraid that in worst case scenario, she would get isolated and never see anyone. (Her dad and I suggested a single would have a lot of benefits, but she was adamant about avoiding the worst-case scenario.) When she was nonetheless assigned a single, she was disappointed. In particular, she was nervous about whether she’d have someone to go to things with during O-week.
It has all worked out wonderfully, however. The kids are pushed together repeatedly (with many mandatory and many optional activities with Housemates) during O-week. House activities continue throughout the year - 2 or 3 each week. Maybe it’s just the luck of the draw, but she loves her Housemates (as described in the thread linked above). And now she’s got a single, with all of those benefits. She hangs out in the House lounge, goes to dinner (and when she eats lunch, lunch) at the House table, does all of the House activities that don’t conflict with a scheduled extracurricular activity, and leaves her door open to invite people walking by to stop in and say “hi”, when she isn’t studying or whatever. We had heard of “house ghosts” - people who spend all their time in extracurriculars, or studying, or with a boyfriend / girlfriend - and there seem to be a couple of those in her House, but the vast majority of kids do seem to interact socially, often quite a bit. Within a month, she had a close friend and a large number of friends to hang out with and was as comfortable as she’d been with her high school gang. We could not have imagined a better outcome.
DD’s general experience of her BJ house is that there are very few frat/sorority kids and very few kids who drink a lot. (This doesn’t mean none, though.) There are a lot of kids who don’t drink at all. They don’t have “bad social skills”, they aren’t asocial at all, and very few of them spend all of their time studying. They are intellectual (no surprise). No one seems to be snobbish or mean. Other than that, there’s a big variety of planned majors and interests. There are artsy kids. They are in a variety of extracurriculars. There’s a variety in how much time they spend on schoolwork.
Based on DD’s experience, I’d say that if a student is not shy and wants to interact socially in a BJ house, it will be extremely easy to do so. Even if a student is shy, it will be easy to do so, as long as she goes to the mandatory and maybe some optional house activities during O-week and gets to know people then, because everyone is in the same boat, looking for friends and people to hang out with.
I did the calculation once, and I forget the details, but the majority of spaces in BJ (all of the Houses) are singles. (By spaces, I mean a space for one student. Obviously, since doubles hold 2 students, the percentage of spaces that are in singles is smaller than the percentage of rooms that are singles, but it’s still the case that the majority of spaces are singles.)
Thank you so much!!! That was very reassuring!
I would say isolation due to singles is exactly the opposite of the biggest problems with BJ