Mission Park is entirely singles this year (sometimes one or two rooms per floor at Mission Park are made into doubles.) There is a common room for every entry, just down the hall from one’s single.
Freshman Quad has a lot of rooms where one double and one single share an additional common room. Sometimes two or three of these kids put their desks in the common room, as well as getting a couch for it, and keep their beds in the smaller double and single bedrooms. So it is a single that is kind of not a single— best of both worlds.
There is a whole section in the Williams College Bell Book (you can find it online) about the relative advantages of Frosh Quad vs. Mission Park. Both are well-loved by students.
100% of freshmen reside in these two dorm complexes.
Freshmen at Williams live in “entries” where a group of freshmen live together and do a lot of activities together. It will be interesting to hear what the entry experience is like this year. Until this year, the entries always had 20 students and two junior advisors (unpaid junior student volunteers who do absolutely no discipline stuff, but just exist to help the freshmen get comfortable on campus and bring them into the community). This year, it has been changed to double entries: 40 freshmen with 3 or 4 junior advisors. I do not entirely understand the reasons for the change (it was about the junior advisors, not the freshmen— something about this new way being better for junior advisors who are members of racial minorities and/or of low-income backgrounds?), but the junior advisors chose it.
Each entry also has a common room where the kids spend time together— sometimes formally for entry meetings and for every Sunday night’s “Snacks,” and sometimes informally just to hang out.
Besides doing things with their entries, freshmen also spend four days of the orientation period in another social group doing an “Ephventure” for which they sign up. A small group of freshmen and two sophomore leaders go on this chosen adventure, which might be a backpacking trip in the mountains, or a canoe trip, or other less outdoorsy activities like visiting local places of interest (museums, etc.) and meeting local residents.
So, having a single is not isolating at Williams, since it is the norm and since there are so many built-in systems to help the freshmen “bond.”