10 Worst Dorms in America
 

I looked at that.. worst article ever. Every campus seems to have 'that dorm' sure, but this just sucked.

Drole is serious? O'Rly? :p

Woohoo!! My dorm (or school) aren't even mentioned. That's because we rocked. :cool:

*points at the list and laughs heartily*

If you click through to the original website, you can search by dorm or school. They also have a "Best 10 Dorms", biggest party dorms, etc.

I was hoping it would have "real" criteria, but it's all just based on student reviews.

Yeah, my school (George Mason) has two dorms on the list. They're not really that bad, I mean it's college, were they expecting palaces? I lived in President's Park and loved it when I was a freshman, and they've been renovated since I lived there in '07-'08.

Like Dee said, it's basically just the reviews of a few people who didn't enjoy living there without hard evidence.

Well the premise is, as far as i can tell, like ratemyprofessor.com that's all well and good.

What sucks is that as an article it's poorly done. It's not about it being serious, or fun (thanks, I do laugh at things), it's that "ugh" is meaningless, and none of the other comments they posted couldn't apply to most dorms in existence. I learned nothing, i laughed at nothing, I think it's a bad article.

You know, like, my opinion.

Have you been to JMU? I'm surprised Eagle hall ("the projects") didn't make the list. "Where the elevator works 60% of the time, every time."

Why do I feel like I've read that somewhere before? LOL

I was there for 2 weeks in the summer of 2001. I didn't think the dorm itself was bad. It was nice and quiet and actually bigger than the dorms of similar nature at my school at the time (Western Michigan University). I actually liked the dorm, just didn't like the hike up the stairs to the Armstrong (the computer lab we were allowed to use)...I think that was the name of the building.

Ditto what Gusteau said. If my dorm is really the 6th worst then every other schools' dorms must be SUPER nice. Forbes wasn't great, but it was by no means THAT BAD, lol

I liked the comment for one of the other U of I dorms. "It's too loud and E-14 is far". 1) the Six Pack dorms are the fun dorms, if you wanted quiet, you shoulda picked ISR. 2) Quit whining about E-14 (parking lot) being far. You're a freshman, you shouldn't have a car!!!

My old dorm only has one review and it scored a 2.2. The comment by the reviewer? "My roommate and suitemates were awful" Hello?? That doesn't have anything to do with the dorm itself!

What makes a dorm good? I would say space, closet/drawer space, amenities, community bath or not.. what do y'all think makes a dorm good?

I think my brain is on 64% right now. How do you do a search for your alma mater? I'm only seeing the "Top Private School Values!" slideshows.

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.

My dorm had vermin too. That was the hardest thing to deal with. The typical freshman dorms were single gender and I was NOT going to be caught dead living in an all girls dorm. So, I carefully crafted my answers on the residence hall questionnaire to ensure that I got placed in the International dorm, the only other dorm where freshman could live. We had kitchens, it was open year round and through breaks so you could stay on campus and work if you needed to. Problem is, during breaks and summer is when they exterminated the other dorms. Mine never got a full extermination treatment. They would spray your room when you complained about roaches and the little critters would run next door for safety. When that room got sprayed, they'd come back to yours. Ick. We had mice rampant at one point too, but they did get those under control pretty fast. Due to the kitchens, and it being the international dorm, the smells were... uhh.. interesting? Back in the 80s you could always smoke everywhere so people smoking and smelling smoke didn't seem like a big deal. I can see how it is a big deal now. Our elevator seemed to work most of the time but I was only up one floor so I used the stairs most of the time. The laundry was awful. Three washers and three dryers for probably 200 people? Ick. I remember we had a trash disposal area where you opened the door and threw your trash down. It was a ramp that led to who knows where, the huge trash pile. Two rooms shared a bathroom but nobody from the university cleaned it, that was our job. I was so thankful not to have community bathrooms though.

Mice? Oh. HELL. NO :eek:

I'm surprised so many people are THAT opposed to community bathrooms. I mean, I get it, but.. looking back on it, that was probably the most entertaining part about living in the freshmen dorms.

Let’s see…

There was the drunk girl who pretended to be a matron, pushing the hand dryer button for everyone who used the bathroom.. and she handed out candy before you left.

There was the one time I got written up with one of my friends for cutting through the boys bathroom (the bathrooms were in the middle of the floor, with a door on each side), and one of my other friends WOULD have been written up too, if she hadn’t kept running.. right out the door to the floor and down the stairs. The very serious “report” written up by the RA – which I still have to this day – reads, “A third female fled the scene.”

There was the time someone used police caution tape to wrap all of the stalls.. and that other time when someone filled all of the shower stalls with Jello.

Then there was the blonde girl who had all of her friends helping her to dye her hair red.. and then came the screaming when it turned orange.

Ah, memories.

Another reason I'm happy that I didn't live in dorms.

I remember visiting UF with a fraternity brother and hanging out at his sister's "dorm" (it wasn't officially on-campus, but the only tenants were female students from the university). Their community bathrooms were cleaner than the individual bathrooms in the dorms at my alma mater.

It will be a sad day when the 6-pack is no more. It's close to IMPE and the stadium and was the fun place on campus. A lot closer to classes than PAR or FAR. Fun times.

Actually, getting written up was another awesome experience. Haha.. go figure.

First of all, I showed up in Student Affairs and had to talk to someone there about myself, and how everything was going with school, what I was involved in, blah blah blah. I guess they wanted to make sure I wasn’t “troubled.” So I said I was in a sorority. The woman asked me which one, I told her, and it turned out she was an AST, too! So we basically just hung out and talked (and later she became more involved with the sorority). So she said, “I know this is a really stupid thing to get written up for, but it’s my job and I have to do this.. so I need you to choose a small project to do.” They were little PR/safety/healthy living “advertisements,” so to speak, that you’d have to create. So I chose to design a flyer type thing to be put up around campus regarding the dangers of drinking and how to handle certain situations when it comes to alcohol.

I was bored one night (I’m pretty sure I was snowed in), so I went all out with it. What started out as a few flyers to be put up turned into something that was posted all over campus. They were also included with students’ information packets when they first arrived at school, and were handed out at different events regarding alcohol awareness. I felt pretty damn special. Lol.

And it was all because I spent 3 seconds in the guys’ bathroom.

That's more a reflection on the oollege's culture rather than dorms. It was impossible to get "written up" at my college for a dorm-related matter unless it was something that would have gotten you arrested outside the dorms.

Well, it really depended on the RAs at my school. A lot of them were cool, but the one that had me written up we would call (and I'm not using his real name) Deputy Mike. He ENJOYED writing people up.

I remember when New Found Glory played at my school, and the band's tour bus was outside, so me and my friend stood by it after the concert for about an hour. We weren’t extremely close, we didn’t run up to it, we were basically standing around in a place where people normally stand on campus, and Deputy Mike came to yell at us and told us we couldn’t be there. I asked him why, and he couldn’t come up with an answer. At this point more people were coming to stand with us, and in the middle of him being mad over nothing, the band walked onto the bus, hung out for 5 minutes, then came out to sign autographs. And the Deputy looked dumb.

Some people just don’t want others to have fun!

Oh, and that was kind of awesome, too, because news crews were around there and supposedly I was on tv for 5 seconds.

That kid inadvertently did a lot of good things for me! lol

Is this a joke!?!?! They have Miller Hall listed at Ole Miss. Miller Hall is in the process of being demolished! (Literally they started yesterday!) So I guess this isn't really an accurate list!

Oh and I told my husband that his alma mater (Mississippi State) was mentioned a few times. He said those most be the new dorms mentioned because when he went to State the dorms were awful!