Dorm Life

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Unless one is able to get permission to live off campus, it is a requirement for first year students to live on campus.  The benefits of living on campus are boundless; one can become more involved with activities, make more friends, as well as gain an all around better experience.  Arizona State University houses an abundance students on the Tempe campus, not to mention how each student belongs to their own respected dorms.  On North campus, there are four dorms that house underclassmen, while south campus has Hassayampa, Barrets, McClintock, Irish, Best, and not to mention Hayden.

Due to the setup of the dorms, people are housed in halls that coordinate to their majors.  This process of splitting the students up through their residential college helps control influx of students, so that not everyone is going after the same dorms.  Along with the controlling of students, the residential colleges help students live amongst peers that will have similar classes as them.  The residential college system is incredibly helpful with placing students in dorms that will be close to buildings that hold their classes, as well as the side benefit of making friends in similar majors to oneself.

Each dorm has its own specific qualities to it.  Some may offer a free fridge as well as a free microwave, while others have an ideal location, respectively towards the housed major.  That is why each dorm will be evaluated based off of the criteria of how well placed they are for the residential college they house as well as aspects of the dorms they have to offer.  While a good dorm will offer ease of getting to and from class without too much walking or need of using the Flash bus system, it will offer amenities such as wireless internet, fridge, as well as microwave,  and, not to mention, free cable, and the room size as well.  

Seeing as how most of the dorms, since they are based off of the residential college system, it is quite clear to see that the dorms will all be rated very highly.  However, there are some dorms that do not offer free mini fridges paired with a fridge.  Some dorms also have rooms that have more space than others, and depending on the community one lives in, they may have different styles of rooms.  Regardless, each community has its own unique qualities that benefit students, be it the people they interact with, or the location of their dorm.
 

Barrets Honors College

Situated on the south end of campus, just next to Hassayampa Academic Village, is the Barrets Honors College.  Delicious food can be found within the gated community of this miniature campus within the Tempe campus, not to mention the intelligent minds of those who want to be pushed harder in order to succeed.  The Honors College has many different room set ups,  not to mention twelve classrooms among other amenities solely for honors students' use.  Already, the honors college is looking to be of a high evaluative stature.  

The sizes of the rooms vary from what style a student is living in.  There are studio style rooms, which are solely for one person only, single occupant with shared bathroom, which is similar to suite style, also offered, and lastly the quad occupant with two shared bathrooms.  The rooms are more spacious than those that you would find at any of the other dorms, however, in the case of the quad occupant, the luxurious space could easily be taken up by a roommate’s possessions being tossed messily about the area.  Despite that possibility, one could always hold a roommate meeting to solve such a problem as that.  Also, there are more than just the rooms that help Barrets live up to its high quality life.

It is this "nation’s first four-year, residential college within a top-tier public university and supports students at all levels of their academic career" (ASU Housing) seeing as how it is a four year program.  Nine acres of what shares many similarities to a private school, with the prestige of being one of the top ten best honors colleges in the United States.  So it is of no wonder that there are twelve classrooms inside the tall walls that is home to the students here.  With these classrooms, one could expect to find smaller teacher to student ratios, for a more fulfilling learning experience.  This attribute pushes the honors college over the top for how it is such a great community to live in on campus.

ASU Housing

Center

Property of Katie Broyles

Contained in Center Hall, there is Best, Hayden, Irish, as well as McClintock.  Center Hall has a great relationship between its Residence Hall Association staff and Community Assistants along with the Peer Mentors, which is not very common amongst other halls.  This relationship is beneficial for the students living within these halls as well, seeing as how the students leaders may be the ones who direct students to join Residence Hall Association.  The student leaders also bring "seminars on alcohol use, sexual health and diversity to just-for-fun events like basketball tourneys and pizza parties"  (Keller) in order to help new students adjust.  Yet this is not the biggest reason why Center is a great hall to be a part of.

Best, Hayden, and Irish are all located together, and they house the Herberger Institute for Design and Arts as well as College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Students.  The three of these dorms help create the community  known as Arcadia.  Located in the general area of Gammage Theatre, Arcadia is relatively close to buildings that would contain classes related to specific majors within the residential colleges housed there.  Communications is a good example of this, being just a three minute walk away is a pretty handy if one so desires to spend a little more time working on a last minute paper.  However, it is not as strategically placed as McClintock is.

McClintock, also known as CLAS Academy, is situated right next to Hayden Library, and is by far the most conveniently located.  Housing all sorts of majors within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, students from pre-med majors to political sciences.  All of the classes in which these students would be going to are all within a short five minute walk.  The trade off for McClintock’s great placement is the small room sizes, but that is pretty fair.

SPAM

SPAM, also known as San Pablo and Main, is home to students from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, and the School of Sustainability.  While San Pablo houses the students from The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Palo Verde Main is home to students of the engineering variety.  SPAM is located on the North campus, close to the brickyard, as well as the Fulton Center.  For the engineering majors in Palo Verde Main, this is very convenient.  However, the students from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as the School of Sustainability must trek across the bridge in order to reach their classes.  So in terms of how well these dorms are placed, Palo Verde Main is a much better dorm than San Pablo.

ASU Housing

Despite the setback of being far away from classes, San Pablo has very spacious rooms.  Compared to the dorms in Hassayampa, the newest dorm, they are much larger.  Not to mention, two separate desks, as well as two different bedside tables, come along with the room.  The desks are also rather large, so it is quite nice for when a student might bring a television to their room.  Yet with a bigger room, a bigger mess may come along with it, should their be messy inhabitants in the room.  Nothing that a quick suite meeting could have fixed, as Katie Reynolds, of Central Connecticut State University states “just addressing common issues can help put an end to them” (University Chic 46).  So despite the drawbacks of being farther from the center of Arizona State University’s Tempe campus, the comfy room sizes make-up drastic points for how San Pablo is a good living space for first year students.

Hassayampa

Hassayampa Academic Village is one of the newest dorms on campus.  With students from the W.P. Carey School of Business, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, there is a healthy dose of mixed majors.  Hassayampa is known to students as the party dorms; filled to the brim with excited students that wish to uphold Arizona State University's title of being a party school.  It is almost humorous how these dorms full of party animals is seated right next to the honors college.  

Which leads to the first point; Hassayampa is pretty far away from the center of campus, where most classes are held.  Just about a five to ten minute walk from their dorms to Memorial Union, the heart of Arizona State University’s Tempe campus.  Students wind up needing to use the Flash bus system, which only runs Monday through Friday.  With such a distance between these dorms and a large amount of the buildings that would host classes for these students, it may as well be deemed off campus living.  With off campus living, there comes the facts that students who live on campus their first year have more beneficial gains in the area of academia (Ernest 216-220).

Though the rooms are some of the newest on campus, they are not, however, provided with such amenities like a free fridge or microwave.  The trade off for that is a much more spacious room, not to mention decent showers.  Students are located very close to a student service center, where tutors help students with homework related to certain subject areas.  These factors help boost Hassayampa to be a bit better than it might have been rated.  Wireless internet is offered, as well as free cable.

With all these factors in mind, Hassayampa isn’t quite what one would hope for it to be.  Though these dorms are new, and somewhat big, they however have the downfall of being rather far from most of the classes on campus.  Hassayampa is a decent dorm to live in on campus, but it has plenty of room for improvement to what it could offer.

Plex

Palo Verde East, as well as, Palo Verde West create Plex hall.  Plex is home to both students that are part of Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, as well as exploratory students.  Palo Verde East and Palo Verde West are both settled on North campus, right across from one another, as well as facing each other.  The article by Katie Crowe in The Frederick News Post sums it up nicely with how "[t]hey allow students to expand their studies beyond the classroom by establishing shared living quarters -- a house, dorm or hall, for example -- and explore their interests with activities such as field trips and discussions" (Dorm Life With a New Purpose, Crowe) with other students from different backgrounds.  Seeing as how these dorms are suite style, not to mention enclosed in doors, the students housed within interact more with one another, as well as get to know each other better than a dorm with a courtyard style structure.  This is a valuable advantage to making new friends, should one not be familiar with anyone yet.

ASU Housing

Once friends are made, the students are already very close to one of the hot spots for student activity.  Many events are held just outside on the Beach, where students can learn more about their campus, sexual health, or even catch a pickup game of ultimate frisbee or soccer.  This helps even more in the process of making friends.  After such activities and programs, students easily go to the North Campus Starbucks as well as relax in the Sun Spot.  While they are there, they could grab a care package from the UPS store.  Overall, Plex is a good spot for Sun Devils to cultivate new friendships and discover more about yourself and others.

Works Cited

Works Cited

Crowe, Katie.  “Dorm Life With a New Purpose.” McClatchy-Tribune Business News. 24 Aug 2012.  Wire feeds.

Garton, Christie.  U Chic: The College Girl’s Guide to Everything. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc, 2009. Print.

Keller, Susan Jo.  “Dorm Life 101.”  The New York Times. 7 September 1997. Print.

Tempe Campus|ASU Housing. Arizona State University. 24 October 2012.