What I liked most about my dorm was that it was very social. At the same time, I could easily find a space in the lounge if I needed quiet time and wanted to study. I also LOVED that we had an a la carte cafeteria (not all the dorms had them). They were open all day til midnight and then like 1p-1a on weekends. You could opt for a meal plan that gave you a certain amount of meals/week and then also a certain amount of credit/week that could be used in the a la carte place. They had AWESOME cheese sticks and smoothies. I think those things definitely made my dorm a good dorm.

Obviously, bigger rooms would have been nice. I'm a pretty light packer/love organizing so the small closet wasn't a big issue. I was able to find places for all of my stuff.

Location is also super important to me. My dorm's location was only so-so, but everything else made up for it.

I'm really sad because in a few years my dorm will be no more. They're tearing down what is known as the "Six Pack" to make room for new dorms. They've already built the cafeteria/common area for the new dorms and it looks SWEET, but I'm sad that my dorm is going to be gone. So many great memories there...lots of fun goofy nights w/ the roommate...met my future husband just down the hall. Sigh.

But I can't let them malign Mason! :p

I haven't been to JMU, and I'm trying really really hard to not make disparaging comments about that overrated dump...oops.

Agreed, nice housing was one of the reasons Mason stood out among other schools I was looking at. Air conditioning for freshman was not a given at every school I visited.

That reminded me that the person complaining about the Park said it was too far from campus. But... it's on campus? Yes it is on the outside of Patriot Circle, but the rest of "campus" i.e. dining, academic buildings are just across the street. Map

LOL People are dumb.

The best part about the E-14 comment is that those dorms are the CLOSEST campus buildings to that parking lot, aside from the Assembly Hall & Memorial Stadium. :rolleyes:

T_T

so much love there. lol

thetaj, doesn't it help that I was trying really really hard?

In all seriousness, some of my favorite people have come out of JMU, and I have nothing but respect for the Delta Chi chapter there. I'm just really sick of Mason being talked down in favor of JMU when all facts point to Mason as a superior institution (in my opinion, obviously).

YES CLEARLY you were trying REALLY HARD you turd

Only kidding :p I'm not from VA and I left JMU after my freshman year to go somewhere in my home state. So honestly I couldn't care less about the other state schools. I have no complaints about Mason at all.

EXCEPT that it was almost entirely non-JMU students that made Springfest blow up, and I am kind of pissed about that. Of the 70-something students that got arrested at the scene, something like 3 or 4 of them were from JMU. And we got SOOOO much crap for it. uugggghhhhhh. But that wasn't just Mason. It was more Tech than anyone.

/rant

OMG I was totally reading the list and thinking to myself "Well, Georgetown would clearly NEVER have a dorm on this list *hair flip*"

I totally gasped audibly just now. We're #3.

The link to the website that did the dorm ratings.. dorm splash.

http://dormsplash.com/

I agree that the list (I won't call it an article, because nothing was really written) wasn't that great. One comment was "It's NYC, so you take what you can get, but our bedroom was too small. No room to walk or open the closet door..." Really? Pretty much every freshman dorm is small, especially in a big city. At Pitt, the freshman dorms were in round, cylindrical towers, and so all of the rooms were pie-shaped and super small. Pretty awkward.

Just saw! Tower A is ranked as #14 worst dorm in the country.

Even better, I just saw the "best dorm" list. A quote from one: "WEST CAMPUS IS WHERE ITS AT. SOUTH IS COOL TOO. MAIN IS ALSO THE SHIZ." Ha.

Yeah nothing on that list is near what I dealt with freshman year. I LOVE my alma mater, but they are lacking in their care of historic or just plain old buildings. I lived in the same dorm my sorority hall was on until I got my bid and moved up. The sorority halls tend to be better kept than the rest of the dorms...cleaner, more cheerful, etc. But we had:
-Hot/cold air units with mold in the vents in every room.
-No way to individually control room temperature. The HRL office controls whether you have hot air or cold air. So in the spring and fall when the temperatures fluctuate wildly you're just SOL.
-You could smoke (at the time I lived there, not now) in your room if you turned on the air and blocked the bottom of the door with a towel. You could also smoke on the balconies. Obviously, this would cause smell issues.
-At the time we had barely working laundry facilities with outrageous charges for use. I've been told they're now new machines and are free, so kudos to them for that.
-HRL would let summer soccer camps use our sorority hall (and all of the others) because it's nicer. The camp kids wrote on walls, kicked holes in them, left soccer balls up in the ceiling tiles, wrote on the wardrobes, spilled things...everything you can think of. HRL doesn't fix that damage.

My parents told me when I got to campus I would have to live in the dorms until my senior year. I moved out of the dorms with their blessings at the end of my freshman year. I was also sick almost the entire year and was fine once I left. This happens to a LOT of people and my theory is that it's related to the OOC mold.

There are two mens' dorms that were far worse.

Also as a sidenote, Tutwiler at UA gives me the creeps. And it's gross. So gross.

This makes me happy that I lived in apartments during undergrad. I hung out with people in the dorms, but I don't know if I could live in said dorms.

It's funny--I always thought community bathrooms were part of the college experience. My freshman dorm, however, had it set up where every two rooms shared a bathroom. That was nice--and the custodians let us keep our stuff in the bathrooms. It was a nice surprise, but since we couldn't pick our freshman dorms it wasn't a big deal.

We were also required to live in the dorms for the first 3 out of our 4 years. About half the senior class lived off-campus. I stayed in the dorms, as did most of my friends and virtually all of my sorority sisters. The way I saw it was that I had the rest of my life to live "off-campus." I could walk to my classes and all the restaurants/bars, someone was cleaning my bathroom, and it was as high-security.

When I think of the "worst" dorms, I think of vermin, mold, elevators that don't work, ancient fire alarms that trip easily, out of date wiring (my freshman dorm didn't have that many plugs--maybe fine for the 1950s when it was built, but not so much for the late 90s), and the actual quality of life stuff. College kids today--ridiclously pampered!

Vermin: Check
Mold: Check
Elevators that don't work: Check (well...it worked most of the time but sometimes it would just stop. I guess it got tired.)
Out of date wiring: Check (The internet connections in the rooms would go in and out...the campus didn't have wireless until a couple of years ago). ETA: Plus IIRC the rooms I lived in had two plugs and they didn't want you to plug in more than a certain number of things even with a surge protector.

And yes, we had community bathrooms. That was my first experience always showering with shoes aside from summer camp. They were ok except for on weekends when the cleaning staff didn't come. Not everyone cleans up after themselves. *shudder*

I think even with the updates they've made a couple of campus dorm and the new dorm (which I've never been in but have been told is really nice) most people here live off of campus. It's generally cheaper, actually.