|
Every sorority house on my campus (U of Oregon) had sleeping porches, although the arrangement of them varied from chapter to chapter.
Most of the sororities had one large sleeping porch, that was basically for all of the sophomores (and sometimes some of the juniors as well.) And then they would share a bedroom with a more senior member who was the "room owner" and actually slept in the bedroom. The more junior member would just use the space to store her belongings and/or hang out during the day. (How equitable these arrangements were varied a great deal from chapter to chapter.)
One of the reasons I was actually drawn to my chapter was because it was one of the few sororities on campus where there were no room owners, everyone slept on a sleeping porch and the bedrooms were just where you spent your day/kept your stuff. I actually enjoyed it, but we also had a number of sleeping porches of different sizes so it wasn't fifty girls all sleeping in one giant room. We had a series that slept eight girls each and one larger one that held about 30, I think. The varying sizes also allowed us to designate different "types" of porches. We had one that was for light sleepers who needed absolute quiet, another for rowdier members/loud sleepers, etc...
There are both pros and cons to the sleeping porch arrangement and I think a lot of it can vary depending on how it is set up. But our sleeping porches were all on the third floor and had 24-hour quiet hours which was definitely nice. You don't have to worry about staying up until 4am and waking your roommates and you don't have a situation where a younger member feels like a guest in their own room and has to tiptoe around the older member.
|