<p>Thank you Schmaltz, I needed that laugh.</p>
<p>Schmaltz, will you be shocked to learn that they were not all “guys?” </p>
<p>I’m sure that Duke has certified squirrel counselors available, should they prove necessary. The Med School is close by.</p>
<p>I guess they’re not as nuts as I thought.</p>
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<p>Do I ever disagree! It’s nice to have somewhere to sleep if you return to your room and discover you’ve been sexiled. It’s nice to have a place where guests can sleep without sharing your room. It’s nice to have a place where you can type your paper at 3 am with the lights on without disturbing your roommate who is trying to sleep–and without having to go outside. If your roommate is hacking his/her head off with a bad cold, it’s great to be able to go into a different room to get some sleep.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I lived on campus Frosh year, then moved off to various apartments the remaining years. I LOVED my apartments, chance to cook what I wanted, the necessity to work out bill paying with roomates, food shopping. I felt so much more adult.</p>
<p>jonri, you can accomplish all that with singles off a hall. What I don’t like about suites is that they tend to keep people socializing with their friends in the suite instead of going out into public spaces in the residence halls where they can meet a larger and more varied group of friends.</p>
<p>How hard it is to travel to places other than home, at times other than scheduled breaks.</p>
<p>Students may not care about this for their first three years, but in senior year, when they’re traveling all over to interview for jobs, suddenly it becomes a crucial consideration.</p>
<p>As for on-campus versus off-campus living, I think it depends on the student’s desires and expectations. Certainly, students should be aware of the living patterns at the colleges they apply to. A student who looks forward to off-campus living should not attend a school where everyone is required to live in the dorms for all four years, and one who believes that dorm living is the essence of the college experience should not attend a school where the upperclassmen live in apartments.</p>
<p>As it happens, each of my kids lived on-campus for two years and then off-campus for two years. I don’t see anything horrible in that, and neither did they.</p>
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<p>Depends on the schools definition of suite. DS’s school has freshman ‘suites’ that are basically 2 bedrooms joined by a bathroom in between. No living room, no kitchen. So, not really helpful. His sophomore suite is the same, except with small kitchenette.</p>
<p>On the positive side, DS’s school has a large, basically a cool hang-out place with computers, comfy couches and endless whiteboards in the physics building that all the physics students get a key to. Very conducive to socializing as well as getting help with problem sets from upperclassmen who also hang there. It’s been a great experience although one we were really not aware of prior to matriculating.</p>
<p>^Yeah, that’s not a suite in my book. I think a suite has a shared living room. Kitchenette is optional - that makes it more of an apartment. My son’s dorm at Tufts isn’t beautiful, but every time I’m there, kids really are hanging out in the lounges on every floor. </p>
<p>My older son hangs out at the Linux Cluster at Carnegie Mellon - not at all what I had imagined him doing, but it suits him. They play cards, talk and presumably work on their projects.</p>