essay on dormitory life

The Stresses of Dorm Life

T o the chagrin of many freshmen, most universities — RIT included — require first-year students to live on campus, in residence halls or dormitories. Dorm life has become a quintessential part of the “college experience,” and its benefits are often touted; strong, lasting friendships, a sense of college community and an environment set up for learning. Dorms are so beneficial that they are even becoming an option for young professionals seeking to avoid high rents post-graduation.

But are dorms really all that beneficial for first-year college students? The jury is still out — for every study confirming the benefits of dorms, there’s another debunking them.

But are dorms really all that beneficial for first-year college students? The jury is still out. 

Studying Versus Socializing

For example, one 2006 study from Arizona State University found that freshmen living on campus had higher GPAs than those living off campus — supporting the idea that on-campus living sets students up for academic success. This is likely because on-campus academic resources are more accessible and because students living on campus don’t have to spend time commuting or trekking to and from the parking lot half a mile away.

Living on campus could increase students’ GPAs by about half a letter grade, according to a 2010 study of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. But another 2010 study from Rice University criticized previous studies for ignoring the impact of race and socioeconomic factors and found that the GPA-boosting effects disappeared when a broad range of universities were studied. This study also posited that the greater accessibility of academic resources to on-campus students is negated by the distracting social aspect of on-campus living, resulting in a net negative effect on students' grades. For example, few students have the willpower to go to the library when they could be hanging out with friends instead.  

However distracting the social aspect of on-campus living may be, it is one of the most important, and often the most rewarding, aspects of dorm life. Having a sense of belonging to some sort of community is important for both mental and physical health, and the community facilitated by dorms is no different.

“It was just a nice space to be able to go to after a long day of classes and meetings,” fourth year Industrial Design major and former resident assistant (RA) Sumin Oh said of her first year dorm. “And it was always nice to have the floor to welcome you back, especially with my floor being a special interest house. People were always saying hi and greeting you ... always interested in how you’re doing.”

Jake Ellis, a second year International Business major and RA, also found the social aspect of dorm life invaluable.

"I really liked the aspect of being social,” Ellis said. “That was a lot of fun for me. I like being surrounded by my friends all the time and I don't know what I would do without that now."

Packed in like Sardines

However, this sense of community can also prove to be overwhelming, especially for more introverted students or for students who highly value their privacy. Even extroverted students can find the hyper-social environment of dorm life grating after a while, especially because so many freshmen move into the dorms without ever having had the experience of having a roommate. This can put a strain on dorm residents’ newly developing communication skills and can lead to conflicts between roommates or floormates.

“You’re sharing a lot of spaces,” Oh said. “You’re sharing the kitchenette, you’re sharing the lounge, you’re sharing the bathroom, so things can get really messy and gross. So being able to talk about what you think about that space or what you hope that your fellow residents would do is another step up for a lot of freshmen. Telling the floor, ‘Oh yeah, I’m not comfortable with that,’ or, ‘Can you pick up your hair?,’ ‘Can you flush?’ Just basic, simple things — they can be hard to talk about.”

Gary Xu, a fifth year Electrical Mechanical Engineering Technology major and two-and-a-half-year dorm resident, agreed that a lack of privacy can lead to conflicts that are particularly difficult to solve.

"People need some privacy, right?" said Xu. "So in an environment like that, there's always someone next to you. Sometimes the best way to solve a conflict is just to walk away from it. Give it some time and it will just solve itself. In that environment, once it gets intense, there's no running away."

“In that environment, once it gets intense, there’s no running away.”

The more students living on one residence hall floor, the more difficult it can be for each resident to get some privacy, and the more likely it is that conflicts will arise. RIT has been criticized for overcrowding dorms as the student population rises by cramming three students into rooms meant for two, or turning lounges into makeshift bedrooms.

A 2015 PawPrints petition by Rory Glenn entitled “Stop Overbooking RIT Housing” stated, “Freshmen should come here feeling welcome, with a living space to call their own and enough room for them to maintain some level of independence. [They] deserve the chance at a college experience, but instead, they are being promised a space and then being packed in like sardines into unhealthy living conditions.”

Kevin Mejia, a fourth year Business Management and International and Global Studies double major and current RA, lived in a forced triple — a double room housing three students due to lack of space — his first semester.

“I’m not going to lie, because it was really complicated,” Mejia said. “Because it was such a small room for three people. It’s a small enough room for two people already, and then adding one more person on top of that is just too much ... That also led to us not being in the room, so I would never be in the room and I would not really be communicating with my roommates.”

"It’s a small room for two people enough already, and then adding one more person on top of that is just too much."

Living in a small, cramped space can be stressful. In fact, research has found that prolonged living in small spaces can increase rates of domestic violence and substance abuse. People need space — not only to sleep or store their belongings, but also to relax. But  space to unwind can be hard to come by in dorms, particularly when lounges have been converted into rooms.

“The lounge used to be a space where residents could meet each other, introduce each other, talk about how their days were going and really become a floor community,” Oh said. “So having that lounge taken away really does become a problem.”

Without a lounge to serve as a place of relaxation, students often seek sanctuary in their rooms. However, many students find their rooms to be stressful — a physical representation of their bad roommate experiences, or far too similar to a jail cell in appearance with plain white cinderblock walls.

“Oh yeah, mine was definitely a jail cell,” said Mejia. “But I know now that people are able to cover or ... paint on their doors ... and it just makes you feel better, makes you feel more at home in a way.”

Some, however, view the sparse appearance of dorm rooms as more of an empty canvas.

“I like that it’s empty,” Oh said. “Part of an empty dorm room is that you have the freedom to decorate the way you want to. Which I think can be a little liberating.”

Despite the freedom students have to decorate, it’s no surprise that some have pointed to dorms as the cause of negative impact on students’ mental health issues, due in part to all of the stresses associated with living in such a cramped, hyper-social environment. The rate of mental health problems reported by college students has been skyrocketing in recent years: in the 1980s, approximately 10–15 percent of college students suffered from mental health problems; today it’s closer to 33–40 percent.

This increase is in large part because of increased financial and academic pressures, but stressing out about roommate conflicts and other housing issues is likely to exacerbate feelings of depression and anxiety. This is especially true for first year students, who are likely to be unfamiliar with the mental health resources offered by RIT, and could feel too overwhelmed to seek them out.

Some universities, such as the University of Iowa, have had success dealing with students’ mental health by embedding professional counselors in residence halls to serve as a resource for students who might not otherwise have reached out for help. Unless RIT implements a similar system, stressed-out dorm residents must learn to recognize in themselves when they need help and seek out resources such as the Counseling Center on their own.

The Dorm Experience

There’s a lot to dislike about living in the dorms, but there’s a lot to like, too. Oh rated her overall experience as a dorm resident a 9 out of ten due to the tight-knit floor community she experienced. Mejia gave his experience as a freshman in a forced triple a 5 out of ten — but now that he’s an RA and has his own room and space, he would give his experience a ten out of ten.

Feeling overwhelmed by the stresses of dorm life is completely natural. It can help to remember that this housing situation is temporary and that it can be an excellent learning experience. Most students come away from their dorm experience with strong, lasting friendships and better communication and conflict resolution skills.

“I tell all my friends, whether they’re RIT students or not, that living on campus, especially in a dorm, is an experience that you’re never going to have any other time in your life ...” Ellis advised. “So this is your one experience ... I think it’s definitely an experience that really helps you build relationships in your first year.”

“I tell all my friends, whether they’re RIT students or not, that living on campus, especially in a dorm, is an experience that you’re never going to have any other time in your life.” 

Looking back on his first year, Mejia reflected that his experience in the dorms taught him about himself and about the importance of communication with his roommates.

“Yeah, I can’t deal with other people, I can’t live with other people,” Mejia said. “But now that I’m realizing it, if that were happening to me now, I’d be better fit to communicate and talk it out and come to some kind of resolution with them.”

“The key is to respect your roommates and get respected by your roommates,” said Xu, underscoring the importance of building good interpersonal skills.

Oh, too, agrees that living in dorms can be a great learning experience.

“I’ve met people where they said that being introverted and being on floor kind of challenged them to be more extroverted and talk to more people,” said Oh. “Which was a good self-development process.”

It can also help to reach out to someone — an RA is a great place to start.

“How do you talk about how you’re not doing okay? How do you help yourself so that you can make the most out of school resources? I think RAs are like a bridge to all the major resources on campus,” said Oh. “Because, as a freshman, you’re overwhelmed with all this information and you need to know how to grasp all of this ... It’s kind of nice to have a personal connection — an RA to tell you you could try this center or that center.”

The evidence that dorms are beneficial for improving students’ academics or for improving students’ mental health through a sense of strong community is dubious at best. But there’s no denying that dorm life has become entrenched in society’s idea of the ideal college experience — in part because no matter how terrible you may feel when arguing with your roommate or roommates about when lights-out is, or when feeling forced to wear flip-flops in the shower, or when searching desperately and in vain for somewhere, anywhere that you can get a little privacy — you’re going to come away from the experience a better person.

College Reality Check

What is it Like to Live in a College Dorm?

You have finally reached the point in your life where you won’t be living under your parent’s roof. Before you pack up and go, you should know what it is like to live in a college dorm.

Living in a college dorm can get quite expensive. There is little privacy and personal space in college dorms. Few dorms give students access to kitchens and washing machines. However, dorms can be a great place to make friends and socialize.

Movies often portray dorm life like it’s a constant party. For some people, this might be accurate; however, most will have a very different experience. The movies neglect to show a balance of the good and bad aspects of dorm life. Here you will learn everything you need to know about living in a college dorm.

Living in a college dorm is often seen as a rite of passage into adult life. In the dorms, you learn more about yourself and others. Most importantly, you start learning how to take care of yourself.

If you can leave home for college, do it. Dorm life will be the transitionary period from letting your parents take care of you to you taking care of yourself.

Before we get into the specifics of living in a dorm, remember that not all dorms are the same. For example, when I was in college, my college dorm was like a mini-apartment that I shared with five other people. We had a kitchen and bathroom.

However, my friend’s dorm was just a single room with two beds. In the corner was a small sink suitable for simple tasks. Down the hall was a communal bathroom and shower room.

In general, two people will share one college dorm; however, some colleges offer private rooms or larger layouts. A private room will cost additional money, and chances are, it will be much smaller than the shared room. 

Although choosing a private room might sound ideal, sometimes the best part of living in the dorms is sharing the experience with others. Unless necessary, it’s a good idea to opt for the shared dorm.

Related Article: Are College Dorms Safe? Why or Why Not?

Living in a College Dorm: Pros and Cons

Now that we know not all dorms are alike, let’s discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of living in a college dorm.

When going to college, especially in a new state or town, many worry about making friends. If you choose a shared dorm room, you will have an instant connection.

Nicole, a student at Montana State University, believes roommates are the most influential part of dorm life. “The quality of dorm life is pretty dependent on your roommate situation,” she said.

Unless you already know someone who is going to the same college dorm as you, chances are your first set of roommate(s) will be randomly selected. However, in future semesters, you can arrange to live with the friends you make along the way.

Be prepared to have disagreements with your roommates. Living with someone can strain the relationship. Use your time in the dorms to learn how to solve problems with discussion and compromise.

If you like to have plenty of time alone, do not expect excessive privacy in the dorms. You will live close to your roommate and dozens of other college students. Other residents will frequently occupy the dorm’s common areas.

Being surrounded by people also means being surrounded by noise. However, some dorms have mandatory quiet hours to ensure students can get some much-needed sleep.

Related Article: Are College Dorms Noisy [From Student’s Point of View]

Unfortunately, dorm life can be expensive. A dorm at a public college costs about $8,887 a year ; meanwhile, private colleges charge about $10,089 a year. Throughout your college education, you will spend about $36,000 to $40,000 on dorm rent alone.

Remember, few dorms include kitchens. If they do, you will probably share it with the entire building. When you decide to cook, someone else might already be in the kitchen. Additionally, unless you have a mini-fridge in your room, you will have limited fridge space available.

Most students choose to pay for a meal plan to the campus cafeteria or dining hall instead.  The Hechinger Report  found that college students pay $4,500 (on average) for an 8-month meal plan. Assuming the student eats three meals a day, this averages out to $18.75 a day. If you order takeout or eat at a restaurant, the money does not carry over to another day.

Something we all took for granted when living with our parents was the washing machine. Not all dorms have laundry machines, and even fewer will be free. You will need to plan times to do your laundry and may need to set a few extra dollars aside each month.

For example, if you did one (small) load of laundry every two weeks, you would spend about $30 on laundry every semester.

Read Next: What to Bring to a College Dorm: Full List

Resident Assistants

Although you are no longer living under the supervision of your parents, you are still not free to do whatever you want. Even college dorms have rules. The dorm will hire a Resident Assistant, also called an RA, to enforce these rules.

William , a former RA at the University of Oregon, explained the role of a Resident Assistant, “You’ll have an RA whose job is to report violations of rules and to help you with any problems you might have.”

No two RAs will be alike. While some RAs are very strict and involved in students’ lives, others take a more laid-back approach. You’ll have to be prepared for either approach. No matter where you live, your RA is likely just another student with similar problems as you. Show them respect, and they will usually do the same for you.

After hearing all this, you probably think living in the dorms would be a nightmare; however, this is far from the truth.

You only get to live in the college dorms once in your life. There will be times where you feel crowded or annoyed, but there will also be moments you will remember for the rest of your life. Living in the dorms will teach you many valuable life lessons.

If possible, take the opportunity to live in a college dorm.

Related Article: Can You Drink In College Dorms?

Host of the "College Reality Check" podcast. Accepted to Northeastern, UMD, U of Illinois Urbana Champaign, UPitt, Drexel, Virginia Tech, and UMBC.

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Living in the Dormitory: Everything You Need to Know

Moving to the dormitory from your family home can be difficult — it’s a total change of environment and social circle. However, it is possible to make this experience easier if you know what to prepare for in advance. In fact, everyone who ever lived in a dormitory says that it was challenging, but in the end, it was a worthwhile experience. 

More than 40% of students all over the world live in dormitories — the rest either stay with their parents or work and rent separate housing. If you’re moving to another city or country, the dormitory will be the most economical and practical choice. If you are planning to live in a dormitory, apply for it in advance. 

It Might Get Loud

Even with everyone observing all the rules of living together, you should not hope for complete silence, solitude, and peace when living in a dorm. It is possible that your neighbor will prepare for exams at night, rustle through the pages of books, or even snore. Prepare by having noise-cancelling headphones or ear plugs. 

Living Harmoniously

Not all colleges and universities provide the opportunity to choose your roommate. At some universities, you can fill out a questionnaire that will match you with a roommate whose personality type and interests will be close to yours. But if that’s not the case, you and your new roommate will both need to make an effort to coexist peacefully in your shared space.

Practical Needs

When you go to university, you will need to start taking care of yourself. Unfortunately, a hot lunch already prepared by your mom for your return from school is no longer available. Yes, you can always buy hot food at the university cafeteria, but if you have your own kitchen, it can be less expensive to shop at the nearest grocery supermarket and cook for yourself.

In addition, living with a stranger implies certain rules of coexistence. And maintaining cleanliness and order is one of them. Therefore, it is common courtesy that you know how to take care of your shared space by picking up after yourself and keeping it clean. Also, you will need to know how to launder your own clothes. Try to work on these skills before leaving home!

Your Residential Assistant Can Help You

Your residential assistant (RA) wants to help you settle in and adjust to the change in your living situation. Use your RA as a source of information — ask about rules you don’t understand or where to find the closest shops. Because they have been through what you’re experiencing, they are in a great position to help you navigate your new life.

Don’t Forget to Study!

Admission to college, moving to a dormitory, in a new city, with new people and new rules can be stressful. At first, you might feel strange, miss home, and have difficulties with your studies. Most students go through this stage and it is important to help yourself through this time. Even if it’s hard for you to get used to living in the dormitory, if you’re struggling with the noise and constant presence of other people, remember your goals. Work on your time management skills so as not to do your homework at the last minute. 

Be a Change Superstar 

Going to college and living in a dormitory will help you grow up. With so many new experiences, friends, and learning opportunities, your life will never be the same again. Enjoy the changes you’re experiencing and have fun living and learning in your new dormitory!

Frank Hamilton

Frank Hamilton is an editor at review service Online Writers Rating. He is a professional writing expert in such topics as blogging, digital marketing, and self-education. He also loves traveling and speaks Spanish, French, German, and English.

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Why Living in College Dorms Is an American Rite of Passage

Since the 17th century, educators have designed housing to create ‘morally conscious citizens’.

Douglass Student on move-in day in the early 1960s. Courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University.

by Carla Yanni | September 8, 2019

Zócalo’s editors are diving into our archives and throwing it back to some of our favorite pieces. This week: For many years, American college residence halls were organized to keep groups of students apart. They evolved to become more democratic and egalitarian, author Carla Yanni explains.

This rite of passage is taken much more seriously by Americans than by people in other countries. In the United States, largely because of Americans’ romantic attitude toward the universities of Oxford and Cambridge—where young men once lived and studied together and forged lasting identities based on shared housing—students living together in one building has come to be seen as an essential part of the college experience. Students spend just 12 or 15 hours per week in class, plus a few hours of study; the rest of the time they are socializing, working out, gaming, managing clubs, politicking, making music, and relaxing with friends. In short, they are forging connections that will last a lifetime and establishing a network that will benefit their careers.

But living on campus—and the social benefit Americans place on it today—was never inevitable. American universities haven’t always intended for dorms to bring people together; campus housing was also organized, for many years, to keep groups of students apart. In fact, the very first purpose-built residence for college students in America was the Indian College at Harvard University, constructed by a British religious society in the mid-17th century to house Native American students and keep them separate from white boys.

And while today’s residence life experts tout diversity as the key reason for residing with fellow students, from the 17th century to the early 20th century, anti-diversity was the norm. Dormitories introduced young men to other men like themselves, and anchored young women in the domestic sphere they were expected to inhabit later on—and architects and university leaders came up with physical designs that furthered these social goals.

Over the decades, universities designed dorms to promote desired social norms, and in the postwar period, high-rises became popular. Here, two boys stand on a dorm balcony at Rutgers University on move-in day, 1955. Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

In the colonial period, college buildings were often single, multipurpose structures that housed all the functions of a school, including the president’s home, faculty apartments, student bedrooms, chapel, library, dining hall, and classrooms. Harvard’s first governing board reported in 1671, “It is well known … what advantage to Learning accrues by the multitude of persons cohabiting for scholasticall communion, whereby to acuate the minds of one another, and other waies to promote the ends of a Colledge-Society.” Since the actual curriculum was limited, Christian morality was a large part of what boys absorbed at the colonial college. This character formation was gained by observing role models; professors and students sharing living space was good for moral development. This attitude was an essential intellectual and emotional precondition for the American dormitory.

A uniquely American sense of religious identity provided the ongoing impetus for sorting students into dorm-style housing during the 18th and 19th centuries. Great Britain had one official state religion, Anglicanism, which dominated life at both Oxford and Cambridge. But in the United States, religious freedom expressed itself in dozens of sects—each of which wanted its own college, with its own moral imprint on its members. Religious leaders often founded small schools in rural districts, away from the crime and vice of the city; assigning students to live together in a dormitory allowed young boys to bond with each other and their tutors, reinforcing their social connections. Ideally, a young man’s roommate had a marriageable younger sister, tightening the bond once more.

Although dorms were exclusionary, on balance, university-sponsored housing was still more democratic than the houses built by the private fraternities for white men in the late 19th century. As fraternities surged in popularity, they erected houses for dwelling, partying, and secret rites on many American campuses. They soon began to dominate college social life, and by the 1870s a non-Greek student (also called an “independent”) had little chance of becoming student body president or first trombone in the marching band. As historian Nicholas Syrett has explained, “Like any society that includes some people and excludes others, fraternities gain prestige precisely through that exclusion.”

In the service of solidifying their status, fraternity men also pushed the boundaries of acceptable student behavior. At Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and other colleges, fraternity brothers made it known that so-called coeds (female college students) were not allowed at their parties, and that local women were the preferred guests. The brothers saw lower-class women as sexually available and “ostracized those female classmates who threatened their hegemony on campus,” Syrett writes.

College deans maintained that the gulf separating fraternity men from other men on campus could be blamed on housing. In 1930, S. L. Rollins, a dean of men at Northwestern University, spoke plaintively, “[It is an] undesirable result when the fraternity men are well housed while the independents are not. This inequality in housing is the predominant cause for the feeling of inferiority [among non-Greeks] and for their animosity toward the fraternity men.” Today it might seem laughably naïve that anyone thought animosity arose from poor housing, rather than racial and religious discrimination, but Rollins and other administrators felt that the construction of good dormitories was a positive intervention that would smooth the torn fabric of college life. So, in the early decades of the 20th century, many university leaders lobbied strenuously for a new sort of residence hall to serve as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity.

Many of these pre-World War II dorms were arranged around a quadrangle, much like Cambridge and Oxford, to shut out the bustling city, create a private outdoor space, and hark back to vaunted English forebears. The University of Wisconsin’s Adams and Tripp Halls, built in 1924-26, are typical. They face away from Lake Mendota, making them cozy and self-contained, and they are laid out in the shape of a square donut, with four sides built to the same height and a central courtyard inaccessible to anyone other than a resident.

The University of Wisconsin’s Adams and Tripp Halls, pictured here on a 1926 postcard, were designed to level class distinctions. Courtesy of Carli Yanni.

College deans wanted to establish the same esprit-de-corps within houses as could be found in an exclusive fraternity, but that required engineering. Each man had a single bedroom, so to create community out of these single rooms, students were organized into houses, formed vertically off of a staircase in a porous arrangement sometimes called the staircase or entryway plan. A brochure directed at incoming Wisconsin students emphasized the possibility that dorm life in places like Adams or Tripp Halls could level class distinctions, noting that the son of a banker and a farmer’s boy could converse and relax in front of the crackling logs of the fireplace.

Unfortunately, for all these widespread claims of egalitarianism, the dormitory still perpetuated barriers. Black students, for instance, weren’t permitted to live in white dorms—at Wisconsin or nearly anywhere else in the U.S. When the enormously popular University of Wisconsin chef Carson Gulley, who was African-American, couldn’t find housing in Madison in pre-civil rights America (before the mid-1960s), university leaders assigned him an apartment in Adams Hall—but it was in the basement, and Gulley’s family had to enter through a separate entrance that was reminiscent of a servants’ door.

Chef Gulley’s apartment was shoehorned into an existing dormitory; in contrast, nearly every space at Howard University in Washington, D.C., was built by black architects for black students. At historically black colleges and universities like Howard, the social value placed on the dormitory was high. Black colleges represented in physical form the acquisition of land, the aspirations for education, and successful uplift of African-Americans—and a certain style of dorm life became part of the program. But that came with a private cost: The handbook for Howard students said, “Always remember that a Howard student is a marked student. Each represents more than himself or herself, because the University entrusts its honor and reputation to each student.”

In particular, the construction of Howard’s Women’s Dormitory (known today as Harriet Tubman Quadrangle), demonstrates how these spaces were expected to protect and prepare their residents. The building was overseen by Lucy Diggs Slowe—a nationally respected educator, tennis champion, writer, and founder of the first African-American sorority (Alpha Kappa Alpha) who was dean of women at Howard for 15 years. Built under her close direction in the 1930s, the Women’s Dormitory resembled Adams and Tripp Halls at Wisconsin in that it was a completely enclosed. Its courtyard was larger, however, and there were fewer points of entry to the inside of the dorm—it was closed off from the city for the protection of the young women. Howard’s administration assumed that female students needed greater protection and surveillance, so the dorm’s architect, Alfred Cassell, organized room entrances around long corridors instead of the entryway plan.

Lucy Diggs Slowe stands in front of the newly completed women’s dormitory (front row, fourth from the left) with members of the National Association of Deans of Women in 1932. Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

On the first floor of one side of the quadrangle, Cassell, at Slowe’s behest, supplied a panoply of social spaces, including parlors, a music room, and a social hall that could be used for special parties or for everyday dining. “A dormitory should be as much like a well-ordered home,” Slowe wrote, “as it is possible to make it”—in other words, a ladies’ dormitory was where the refinements of a carefully managed home would develop. Students entertained guests in order to learn to be good hostesses, and (later) good wives and mothers. The female students needed the extra living space, in part because they were not to go inside men’s dormitories; if a woman was meeting a date (chaperoned of course), he had to come to her dormitory. The female students at Howard were being trained in “thoughtfulness, courtesy, and hospitality,” Slowe said. Socializing was a goal of living in the dorm; the residence hall set a high standard for social behavior. The beautifully appointed parlors and music rooms were a stage set for enhancing students’ moral development.

Over the decades, American educators have cherished the residence hall as a transformational space in which adolescents turned into adult, morally conscious citizens. Of course, this may seem strange today, when living in a residence hall might just as well lead to a decline in moral character.

Either way, in the weeks around the start of the fall semester, students should stop and think more deeply about the physical space of their residence hall. What possibilities does it offer? Does it reinforce class and race divisions, or does it breakdown social expectations? Corridors make keeping tabs on students easy, but echo with noise; staircase plans prevent roughhousing but offer no communal space; lavish lounges in women’s halls were once intended to civilize male visitors, as were specially designed benches for courting couples. In spite of the fact that college housing policies often allowed for discrimination according to class, race, and gender, deans persisted in their vision of residence hall as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity. Against the backdrop of sweeping societal changes, communal living endured because it bolstered networking, if not studying. It’s no wonder families still pose next to the freshly made bunk bed.

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Articles & Advice > Student Life > Blog

The Pros and Cons of Living on Campus in College

Living on campus in the dorms is a part of the college experience, but it's certainly not for everyone. Here's how to decide whether to live on or off campus.

by Jessica Vanek CollegeXpress Student Writer, Oklahoma City University

Last Updated: Sep 26, 2023

Originally Posted: Jun 18, 2021

To dorm or not to dorm…that is the question. If you’re making this decision for the first time, congrats! For many students, leaving home and going to college is a big step into the unknown. If your academic plans take you to a location away from your family and friends, then considering a living situation with peers who are experiencing it for the first time too may help you feel more at ease. There’s no better way to get in touch with the overall vibe of collegiate life than to live and breathe it 24/7—though living off campus may appeal to you more. Here’s how to decide if dorm life is right for you.

On-campus life

You’ve seen it in the movies, heard about it from older siblings, or maybe even experienced it firsthand on a trial run or extended campus tour: living in a college dorm. Roommates, Greek life, cafeteria food, late-night insomnia cookies—these are all offerings of the little things that await you on this journey. There are some universities that require out-of-state students to live on campus for at least freshman year, and some even beyond that. Research shows this model of higher education creates a sense of belonging. Helping acclimate undergrads to a new life of independent living builds self-reliance and a sense of comradery, thereby curbing homesickness that can sometimes result in a student’s decision to leave or transfer to a school closer to home. Living in the dorms provides an invaluable support system as students find their way in an environment devoid of the rules they may have lived under while in their parents’ home.

Related: The Do’s and Don’ts of Campus Life

Dorm life pros and cons

As with any decision, there isn’t always a single solution that works for everyone—what’s right for one student may not work for another. While the requirement of campus housing may be mandatory for freshman enrollment at certain universities, what about sophomore year and beyond? And what about colleges that don’t require it at all? You need to weigh the pros and cons based on your individual needs.

The pros of living on campus

• Meeting people: Having the opportunity to meet a large group of new people with shared interests is empowering. If you’re on the shy side or tend to be a loner, adapting to a new situation is easier when you have a support squad. Dorm roommates and quad neighbors seem to instinctively come together to help make you feel like any number of people have your back when times get tough.
• Activities : Living in the dorms allows you entrance to group and membership opportunities . Although those who live off campus have this option as well, there are many events and undertakings based on dorm and Greek life that are more accessible and better attended by on-site residents. There’s nothing more fun than a Halloween decorating contest or a dorm-based yoga night.
• Safety: It’s rare that you’ll find yourself traveling alone on campus. At any given time, there are students walking around the property or an escort is only a call away. There are emergency boxes on the grounds of every college, and campus police are always stationed nearby 24/7.
• Gym and library access: Late hours are a huge bonus! If you feel like swimming laps at 10:00 pm, no problem. And libraries make it easy to form late-night study groups during midterms and finals. There are also quiet floors for individually focused study in case you have a roommate who isn’t on the same schedule as you.
• Cafeteria offerings: The “board” part of room and board comes to you in the form of a card that is preloaded with your chosen meal plan . There are generally several cafeterias on any given college campus for variation—some are vegan, others offer specialty nights, and more.  Depending on which plan you signed up for, the cafeteria meals are coupled with “swipes” for other privately run, on-campus eateries, including common staples like Starbucks.
• The quad: Any season, day or night, there’s always something happening on the quad. Fresh air and grass under your feet can be extremely therapeutic. Impromptu soccer games, snowman building, and potluck picnics are open to anyone who wants to join the fun! 
• Your schedule : Your class schedule and proximity to the classroom allows you to sleep a little later in the morning. Gone are the worries of driving, parking, and running into class. You may even find you have time to stop for breakfast by living on campus. And if you have a day that’s lightly scheduled, then you’ll have time to run to your dorm and take a power nap between classes.
• Emergencies: On-campus clinics are available for pop-in emergencies, and many are open late.
• Job opportunities: If you’re an upperclassman, you can apply to be an Resident Advisor (RA). This comes with the bonus of a free or discounted room and looks great on your résumé.
• Connections and lifelong friends: Spending so much time in proximity with the same people fosters comradery, which can lead to relationships that extend well beyond your college years.
• Upgraded living: If you decide to stay in the dorms as an upperclassman, you can choose your roommate(s) and have more control over living in a residence hall that’s compatible with your lifestyle.

The cons of living on campus

• Bad roommates: Sharing a room with someone you’ve just met can be unsettling, as not all roommates are compatible. Freshmen are generally housed in specific dorms, and the number of rooms available may result with you in a situation you didn’t expect.
• Lack of privacy : Unlike at home where you can just shut yourself in your bedroom, most double-occupancy floor plans are simply an open room with two beds and two desks. There are also some that house three or even four roommates, so privacy is mostly off the table.
• Bathrooms: Depending on your plan, you may be required to use a communal bathroom/shower. There are cleaning services that clean the larger, multiuse bathrooms, but in some cases, it’ll be up to you.
• Sharing laundry: Laundry rooms are also shared, and finding a schedule that allows you to get your clothes out of the washer and into the dryer in a timely fashion is key.
• Overindulging: Open access to cafeterias can lead to students to graze, even when they aren’t necessarily hungry.
• Money: If you can find some friends to get an apartment off campus with, chances are it’ll be much less expensive. Splitting rent would lower your expenses , but you’ll be required to provide your own furnishings.
• Illness: Remember in elementary school when one kid got sick, you got sick and brought it home to your parents? The same thing happens in college residence halls.
• Moving frequently: Campus residence halls are generally not open in the summer, as this is the time when painting and maintenance work are done. If you plan to keep the same dorm room for the following academic year, you’ll either have to pack everything up and bring it home with you or move your belongings into a storage unit for three months. 

Related: Is Commuting to College Right for You? 3 Things to Consider  

Once again, let me congratulate you on your acceptance to college! I’ve lived the dorm life, and it worked out great. There are so many wonderful opportunities that lie right outside your door. If you’re undecided, give it a try your freshman year—just make sure you find a roommate you mesh with. If you find it’s not your style, you can always relocate your sophomore year. 

Find out more about what life on campus is really like in our Student Life section.

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About Jessica Vanek

Jessica Vanek recently graduated from Oklahoma City University as a Musical Theatre major with a minor in Mass Communications. She's also attending Oklahoma City University for graduate school, where she will pursue her   Master of Arts in Nonprofit Leadership/Arts Administration.

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College Dorm Life 101

Going off to college can be a stressful experience for freshmen all over the world. Not only will it be the first time living away from home, it may also be the first time sharing a room or living space with someone else, and having a new set of responsibilities. Living with people you don’t know yet can be overwhelming. What if you and your roommate butt heads? What if he or she has a conflicting lifestyle? Needless to say, dorm life can be one of the most nerve-wracking aspects of college that freshmen face each year.

Getting Accustomed to Dorm Life

If you’ve shared a room with a sibling at home in the past, then you may be used to compromising and dealing with not having a personal space to yourself all the time. But those who have never had to live with someone else may find it really difficult to have a roommate, especially a stranger at first. It might take some time to adjust and get comfortable, but fear not – the dorm life can be a very memorable part of the college experience when done right!

Before starting college, you’ll be notified of all your new roommate(s). To make adjusting to dorm life easier, it’s a good idea to reach out to them before moving in for your first quarter. This way, you’ll get the chance to get to know a little bit about each other before meeting, discover each other’s interests, personalities, likes and dislikes, lifestyles, and more.

In addition to introducing yourself, it’s smart to establish a level of comfort between you and your roommates, and together set basic ground rules to abide by so that there’s no unnecessary drama later on. For example, agree on a reasonable time frame when “night-time voices” should be used in consideration of other roommates. When coming up with dorm regulations, be mindful of each other’s schedules and lifestyles (early risers vs. night owls, smokers vs. non-smokers, for example). Becoming familiar with each other early on encourages a more communal and swift dorm living experience.

What Do I Bring?

Another major thing students stress about when it comes to dorm life is what to bring. The last thing you want to do is clutter a small space by bringing something that other roommates already had planned to contribute. By communicating with them before the move-in date, everyone can plan ahead and make their list of what needs to be supplied .

To ensure a complete and comfortable living experience, here is a checklist of dorm room essentials to bring:

• Desk and office chair
• School supplies
• Shower caddy
• Toiletry items like toilet paper, toothpaste, toothbrush, makeup, nail clipper, face wash, body wash, shampoo, conditioner, lotion
• Alarm clock
• Drying rack for clothes
• Laundry detergent
• Laundry hamper
• Compact fridge
• A medicine box with common items you may need like ibuprofen, bandaids, tiger balm, Vitamin C tablets, cold medication, etc.
• Charging cords
• Plants and other decor
• Rolls of quarters for laundry
• Vacuum cleaner
• Dishware and mugs
• Appliances like rice cooker, tea kettle, toaster
• Paper towels
• Portable heater

Communal items you may choose to discuss with your roommates include the TV, microwave, compact fridge, other appliances, vacuum cleaner, and dorm decor. Other smaller things you may choose to either share or keep to yourself include paper towels, some toiletry items, and dishware and mugs. Again, having a discussion with your roommate(s) about who will be responsible to bring what will avoid having duplicate items or confusion later on.

Staying Safe in the Dorms

Remember that you are in control of your dorm life experience more than you might think. This is why campus safety is so important. Everyone must do their part to not only keep themselves safe, but their dorm-mates safe as well. At the beginning of the quarter shortly after settling in, resident advisors usually step in to give students an overview of the dorm and inform everyone of important emergency exits, relevant contact information, and other tips for safety. There may even be a mock fire drill to encourage everyone to be ready in case an emergency strikes.

To stay safe at school, we recommend taking the following precautions:

• Travel with a buddy whenever you can . This is especially important late at night. Most colleges have some sort of campus escort service that’s offered for free so that students can get to and from classes feeling safe not walking alone. Take advantage of it!
• When getting around campus, avoid using shortcuts and unfamiliar routes, and take the well-lit paths .
• Share your schedule with your family, friends, and roommates . This way, if you are not able to travel with a buddy, someone will always be aware of your intended whereabouts and know when to call for help if ever needed.
• Know your campus . Explore your school and neighborhoods, get familiar with the routes you’ll be taking to and from classes and/or activities, and take note of where emergency phones are located.
• Make smart social choices . Networking is an important aspect of college, but the social scenes can sometimes be reckless and even dangerous. Before jumping into Greek life or anything that requires commitment, it’s a good idea to gauge the social scene first, and really evaluate whether or not it’s right for you.
• Keep emergency contacts on and off-campus on speed dial . Contacts might include your roommate, your family members, your close friends, your resident advisor, as well as the official emergency contact line on campus. You never know when you’ll need to quickly reach someone. Having to fumble through your contacts list in an emergency situation is less than ideal!
• Don’t leave portable heaters, candles, or anything potentially hazardous running when you are not there to monitor it .

Meeting New People with Your Roommates

Once you’ve taken time to get to know your dorm-mates, it’s time to branch out and meet other new people on campus! Attending social events and partaking in kick-off activities with roommates can make the experience more fun and much less intimidating.

A great place to start is participating in activities held in your residence hall, which will allow you to meet other people in the dorm aside from your immediate roommates and those living on the same floor. Your resident advisor will be there to help create a welcoming community, but at the end of the day, you also have to do your part to be open to meeting new people. Simply leaving your door open and participating in hall programs can go a long way when it comes to making friends quickly in college.

College is a fantastic place to meet people who can become some of your best friends and/or valuable connections for life. So, make it a point to get involved on campus early on by checking your school’s website and bulletin boards on campus to help you find clubs and organizations that interest you. You never know who you will meet, and what exciting opportunities may come with a growing network!

From a distance, dorm life may be intimidating especially if you aren’t already used to living with other people. But, the reality is, it can also be very fun! Taking the necessary steps early on to get to know your future roommates, learn how to compromise and respect each other, and plan out what to bring amongst each other will ensure a comfortable, exciting dorm experience for everyone.

Dormitory Life and Its Tough Sides for Students

Dormitory life is not necessarily the best setting for serious study. There are potential factors of noise, distraction, and personal discomfort that can make living on campus less conducive to academic achievement. While in some areas, off-campus life is going to be more expensive, it may be a worthwhile investment if it means that you are getting better grades and finishing on time. We will talk about some of the more obvious problems and some that may not be so straightforward as well.

This may sound odd, but dormitories are a lot less studious than they were in our parents’ day. The past several decades have witnessed the transformation of the dorm from a single-sex enclave with a house-mother or house-parents, lights-out and quiet time rules, and one phone in the hallway, to something quite different. We now take for granted co-ed housing, with sources of noise and disruption on every hand.

Consider the stereo equipment powerful enough to damage ear-drums, booming from many students’ rooms. Listen to the sound of cell phones in every pocket as well as, frequently, ringing landlines. There are no televisions in many rooms and computers or handheld devices that beep, ding, talk, play movies, and amplify video games with vivid and gruesome sound effects, or profoundly irritating voices such as in Angry Birds. The result? The dorm can be a fairly noisy spot during the hours when you want to study. The library or a lounge in another building may be your only refuge from such noise.

The word dormitory comes from the Latin word for sleep. A dormitory is supposed to be a place where sleep takes place. Not the easiest accomplishment, given all of the other distractions, to be tolerated. The lights are on in the hallways all night, which can disrupt melatonin production and lead to poor sleep patterns. There are comings and goings at all hours, especially when bars close and parties end, usually accompanied by alcohol-fueled excessive vocal volume and fumbling attempts to unlock doors and disengage from unwelcome embraces. Roommates may be talking on cell or land-lines at any hour of the night. There is always, it has often seemed, someone undergoing a personal crisis that requires peer counseling and support – in the hall, the lounge, or somewhere else in earshot.

Sleep is the one thing that no one can give back to you if they rob it from you. Sleep is what allows you to listen in class without doing a face plant on the desk or allowing your head to roll onto the shoulder of the attractive person next to you in the classroom. Sleep, in short, is not negotiable. And sleep often seems to be the last thing on anyone’s mind in a dormitory.

Even if there are no pieces of technology tintinnabulating at the moment, people create enough cacophony by themselves to banish sleep or study. Consider the games of catch, Frisbee, or hacky-sack in the hallways, the pursuit of practical jokes, and the cooking of food at all hours. The smell of microwaveable popcorn, to take just one example, ranks among the more penetrating odors of the modern world, and can persist for hours and even days in the ill-ventilated spaces of an internally situated dormitory kitchenette. An otherwise harmless empty can of tuna fish, improperly disposed of, can taint the air for a week.

So, think carefully before committing to living in the dormitory.

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Essay About Advantages of Dormitory Life: How to Write

You may be asked to write an essay about the place you live, or the arguments about dormitory life, and both topics lead to writing about a dormitory.

There are a lot of advantages for living in dormitories and you can feel it only from experience. If you did not have a dormitory experience, you will have a hard time writing such an essay, so it will be much better to ask WritingPaper.Org for help. There are a lot of choices that students face when it comes to living inside and outside campus, and still most choose dormitory life. Obviously, there are some reasons why.

Campus Library

If you take your studies very seriously, you may want to have books from the library at hand. Every student knows that writing an essay is not easy and requires a lot of literature, analyses, and research. This is why university libraries are always full of students that are eager to complete their course paper. If you are not one of those eager learners, there is always a possibility to order a paper online .

If you live off campus, far from the university, you have one more disadvantage compared to campus residents. When studying, you often need teacher’s help for research or choosing the topic for an essay. On campus, teachers are always available for communication.

Well, do not even argue: food is more than important, especially when you are busy studying and often forgetting to prepare food for yourself. Every dormitory has its canteen, in which every student can have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The best thing is not only that food is prepared for you, but that you can buy the dish in advance to eat later. Everyone knows that when you study, you always wish for unlimited snacks.

Dormitories are less expensive than places outside the campus, in general. That is why people who were lucky to reserve places in dormitories will never want to change them. While writing an essay about advantages of dormitory life, you might want to mention some statistical figures and prices – they are easy to find. The research will not take long: just ask your group mates about their rent and compare with what you spend.

The best friends in the university are usually the ones that live with you side by side. In dormitories, the best friendship connections are always formed inside the dorms. When students first come to the university, it is better for them to find friends and adjust to a new situation. If you live off campus, you may face issues communicating with other students that have already formed groups based on their dorm life.

Of course, above all, dormitory life is creating memories. If you asked any student what they remember about university life, they would for sure mention dormitory. Friends they met here, essays they wrote at nights, parties they visited – everything will create beautiful memories. However, if writing down memories overnight is too much, why not get rid of this harmful habit and order essays online .

Moreover, dorm life is the first experience of adulthood. Though you are still considered a young adult in the university, for the first time you have to take care of yourself and be responsible for your choices.

In general, writing an essay about dormitory life is just putting your own experience on paper. So, there are no wrong choices and topics, so just be honest.

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• Blog / Student Life

30 Advantages of Living in a Dormitory

by Students Bird

Living in a dormitory provides convenient proximity to campus, academic support, and a strong sense of community. With exposure to diverse perspectives, networking opportunities, and enhanced social life, dorm life offers personal growth, cultural exchange, and valuable life skills. Here are thirty (30) advantages of living in a dormitory that make it an exciting and enriching chapter of your life.

1. Convenient Proximity to Campus:

Dormitories are strategically located within or near the college campus, ensuring easy access to essential facilities. Just a short walk away from classrooms, libraries, and other campus resources saves valuable time and energy that would otherwise be spent commuting. This proximity allows you to maximise productivity and focus more on your studies and extracurricular activities. Whether it’s getting to class on time or utilising the library for research, the convenient proximity of dormitories to campus facilities simplifies your daily routines and enhances your overall college experience.

2. Academic Support:

Living in a dormitory offers access to a range of academic support resources. These may include study groups, tutoring services, and dedicated study spaces. The dormitory environment fosters a collaborative atmosphere where residents can share knowledge, work on assignments together, and seek assistance when needed. This supportive community encourages academic excellence by providing collaboration, brainstorming, and mutual learning opportunities. Whether you need to help understanding a concept, preparing for exams, or seeking study resources, the availability of academic support within the dormitory helps enhance your academic performance and promotes a culture of academic achievement.

3. Sense of Community:

Dormitories cultivate a strong sense of community among residents. Living close to your peers creates a shared experience and fosters a sense of belonging. You can interact with individuals with similar experiences, interests, and goals. This sense of community leads to lifelong friendships and support networks. Within the dormitory, you can find companionship, social engagement, and camaraderie that contribute to personal well-being and a positive college experience. Whether participating in dormitory activities, organising study groups, or simply spending time together, the sense of community within dormitories enhances your overall social and emotional well-being.

4. Cultural Exchange:

Living in a dormitory exposes you to diverse cultures, backgrounds, and perspectives. Interacting with individuals from different cultural backgrounds broadens your horizons and enriches your understanding of the world. Within a dormitory’s multicultural environment, you can engage in meaningful conversations, exchange ideas, and learn from one another’s experiences. This exposure promotes cultural sensitivity, empathy, and a deeper appreciation for diversity. It expands your worldview, challenges preconceptions, and prepares you to navigate an increasingly interconnected and globalised society. The cultural exchange within dormitories contributes to personal growth, intercultural competence, and a more inclusive perspective on the world.

5. Independence and Responsibility:

Living in a dormitory promotes personal growth and independence. It provides a unique environment to learn essential life skills within a supportive community. Managing your schedule, balancing academic and personal responsibilities, and taking ownership of your actions are fundamental aspects of dorm life. This fosters a sense of independence, self-reliance, and accountability. Within the dormitory, you can develop vital life skills such as time management, budgeting, problem-solving, and decision-making. These skills are transferable and valuable during your college years and throughout your life.

6. Networking Opportunities:

Dormitories serve as hubs of social interaction, connecting you with a diverse network of students. These connections can have long-lasting benefits for your future career and professional growth. Living in a dormitory exposes you to peers from various backgrounds, majors, and interests. You can build relationships with seniors who may offer guidance and mentorship and alumni who can provide insights into potential career paths. Additionally, dormitories often host events and programs that bring in visiting scholars or professionals, creating networking opportunities. These connections can lead to internships, job opportunities, and valuable professional connections that can shape your future career trajectory.

7. Enhanced Social Life:

Living close to your peers in a dormitory fosters a vibrant social life. The close physical proximity allows for spontaneous social interactions, whether it’s knocking on a neighbour’s door for a chat or gathering in common areas for impromptu conversations. These interactions often lead to lasting friendships and create a sense of community. Dormitories frequently organise social events, parties, and community-building activities that unite residents. These activities provide opportunities to connect with others, build social networks, and create unforgettable memories. The vibrant social life within the dormitory enhances your college experience, contributes to your well-being, and enriches your overall sense of belonging.

8. Access to Facilities:

Dormitories provide convenient access to various facilities that enhance your daily living. These may include laundry rooms, common areas, recreational spaces, and often gyms or fitness centres. Having these amenities within proximity saves you time and money, as you can easily access and utilise them without travelling off-campus. This convenience promotes a balanced and healthy lifestyle, as you can efficiently take care of practical needs, engage in recreational activities, and maintain physical well-being.

9. 24/7 Support:

Living in a dormitory offers the peace of mind of 24/7 support. Most dormitories have resident advisors (RAs) and security personnel available around the clock. These dedicated individuals ensure a safe and secure living environment. In case of any concerns, emergencies, or need for assistance, help is readily available. Whether addressing maintenance issues, providing guidance, or offering support during challenging times, round-the-clock support in dormitories contributes to your overall well-being and provides a sense of security.

10. Exposure to Different Perspectives:

Living in a dormitory exposes you to a diverse community of individuals with different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives. Interacting with people from various walks of life broadens your horizons and promotes a deeper understanding of global issues. Through conversations, shared experiences, and friendships, you gain insights into different viewpoints, cultural practices, and societal norms. This exposure fosters tolerance, empathy, and a more inclusive mindset. It prepares you to navigate a diverse and interconnected world, shaping you into a well-rounded global citizen with a broader understanding of the complexities of our global society.

11. Personal Development:

Living in a dormitory presents numerous opportunities for personal development. The communal living environment challenges you to navigate and manage various aspects of shared living. From resolving conflicts and finding compromises to effectively communicating and respecting others’ boundaries, you develop valuable life skills essential for future personal and professional relationships. Living close to others also promotes self-awareness, adaptability, and a deeper understanding of your strengths and areas for growth. The experiences within the dormitory environment contribute to your personal growth, helping you become a more compassionate, respectful, and well-rounded individual.

12. Proximity to Campus Resources:

Dormitories are often close to various campus resources, including libraries, research centres, and laboratories. This proximity facilitates easy access to these resources, making your academic pursuits more convenient and efficient.

13. Enhanced Collaboration:

Living near your classmates fosters collaboration and teamwork. The physical proximity makes it easier to coordinate group projects, organise study sessions, and engage in academic discussions. Rather than having to schedule separate meetings or rely on digital communication, you can simply gather in common areas or study lounges to collaborate effectively. This proximity allows for frequent and spontaneous interactions, promoting a dynamic exchange of ideas and knowledge. The ability to easily connect with your peers enhances your learning outcomes by providing opportunities for collaboration, peer learning, and shared academic experiences.

14. Exposure to New Interests:

Dormitories expose you to diverse hobbies, interests, and activities through interaction with your fellow residents. Living close to a diverse group of individuals allows you to discover new passions, talents, and interests. Through conversations, shared activities, and witnessing the pursuits of others, you may be inspired to explore new areas and find like-minded individuals to pursue them with. This exposure to new interests enriches your college experience, broadens your horizons, and adds depth to your personal and intellectual growth.

15. Support System:

Living in a dormitory provides a built-in support system where you can find emotional support, academic advice, and friendship during challenging times. Your fellow residents and resident advisors (RAs) are there to lend a helping hand, provide a listening ear, and offer guidance. Whether you need assistance with academic challenges, navigating campus resources, or simply a friendly presence, the dormitory community becomes a source of support. This support system creates a sense of belonging. It provides a safety net during your college journey, making your experience more fulfilling and helping you navigate the ups and downs of student life.

16. Leadership Opportunities:

Dormitories allow residents to take on leadership roles, fostering personal development and community involvement. Becoming a resident assistant (RA) or joining dormitory councils are common avenues for leadership involvement. You take on a significant leadership role as an RA within the dormitory community. You support and guide fellow residents, create a positive living environment, and address possible concerns or issues. This role allows you to develop essential leadership skills like communication, problem-solving, and conflict resolution. It also provides an opportunity to positively impact your peers’ lives by offering support and mentorship. Joining dormitory councils allows you to contribute to decision-making, plan events, and implement initiatives that improve the overall community and meet the needs of residents. These leadership opportunities within the dormitory community develop teamwork, organisation, and advocacy skills, preparing you for future leadership roles in various personal and professional contexts.

17. Proximity to Extracurricular Activities:

Living in a dormitory provides the advantage of being conveniently located near the heart of the campus, where extracurricular activities take place. Whether it’s joining a sports team, participating in clubs, or engaging in student organisations, the proximity makes it easier to get involved. You can simply walk or commute a short distance, maximising your opportunities for active participation. This proximity encourages a well-rounded college experience by allowing you to explore diverse interests, develop new skills, and build meaningful connections with like-minded peers.

18. Exposure to Different Backgrounds:

Dormitory living exposes you to a diverse community of residents with various socioeconomic backgrounds. Interacting with individuals from different walks of life offers a valuable opportunity to gain insights into different lifestyles, cultural traditions, and perspectives. This exposure promotes empathy and a broader understanding of the world around you. It allows you to develop a more inclusive mindset, appreciates diversity, and cultivate a respectful appreciation for the unique experiences and challenges others face.

19. Opportunities for Personal Expression:

Dormitories often provide residents with the freedom to personalise their living spaces. From choosing decor and arranging furniture to adding personal touches, you can create a unique environment that reflects your personality and preferences. Personalising your room fosters a sense of ownership and comfort, making it a space where you can feel at home. This self-expression through room decoration contributes to your overall well-being and allows you to create a positive living environment that aligns with your individuality.

20. Shared Learning Experiences:

Living in a dormitory presents the advantage of shared learning experiences with your fellow residents. Since you are all navigating similar academic challenges, you can discuss coursework, exchange study tips, and collaborate on projects. This supportive environment cultivates a sense of camaraderie and provides opportunities for intellectual growth. Sharing knowledge and perspectives with your peers enhances your educational journey as you gain insights from different viewpoints and collectively strive for academic excellence.

21. Enhanced Time Management:

Living in a dormitory requires effective time management skills to balance academic commitments, social engagements, and personal responsibilities. With numerous demands on your schedule, you must prioritise and allocate time efficiently. This skill becomes invaluable not only during your college years but also in your future endeavours. By honing your time management abilities in a dormitory, you develop a crucial life skill to meet deadlines, manage multiple tasks, and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

22. Opportunities for Conflict Resolution:

Sharing living spaces with others can occasionally lead to conflicts or disagreements. However, these situations also provide valuable opportunities to develop conflict resolution skills. Resolving conflicts requires healthy communication, active listening, empathy, and problem-solving. By navigating and resolving conflicts within the dormitory environment, you gain valuable experience in handling interpersonal challenges. These experiences contribute to the growth of your conflict resolution skills, promoting healthier and more productive relationships in all aspects of life.

23. Exposure to Different Career Paths:

Living in a dormitory exposes you to diverse students from various majors and disciplines. Interacting with these students provides insights into different career paths and opportunities. You can explore new areas of interest through conversations, networking, and shared experiences and better understand potential future career choices. This exposure broadens your perspective and helps you make informed decisions about your career trajectory.

24. Learning from Upperclassmen:

Living in a dormitory often means sharing living spaces with upperclassmen who have already navigated the college experience. These experienced students can offer valuable guidance and advice based on their journeys. They can provide insights into course selection, internships, co-curricular activities, and campus resources. Learning from their experiences and listening to their advice can help you make more informed decisions and optimise your college experience.

25. Easy Access to Social Events:

Dormitories are typically located at the centre of campus life, making accessing social events and activities easy. You can participate in these events without travelling far, whether it’s parties, movie nights, game nights, or other gatherings. This proximity ensures that you can fully immerse yourself in the vibrant social life of the college, build connections, and create lasting memories with fellow students.

26. Camaraderie during Exam Periods:

Exam periods can be challenging and stressful, but living in a dormitory offers a supportive environment. Your fellow dorm residents understand the pressures of exams and can provide support, motivation, and camaraderie. Studying together, sharing study materials, and offering encouragement can alleviate some of the stress and help improve your academic performance. The sense of solidarity during exam periods creates a supportive community that can boost your confidence and overall well-being.

27. Enhanced Communication Skills:

Living in a dormitory provides ample opportunities to interact and communicate with a diverse group of individuals daily. From navigating roommate dynamics to engaging in group discussions and activities, you develop and refine your communication skills. These interactions teach you to express yourself effectively, listen actively, and respectfully convey your thoughts and ideas. This honing of communication skills prepares you for future personal and professional relationships, as effective communication is crucial in various aspects of life.

28. Embracing Diversity:

Dormitories celebrate diversity by bringing together students from different backgrounds, cultures, and identities. This exposure to diversity fosters inclusivity and broadens your perspectives. Interacting with individuals from diverse backgrounds allows you to learn about different cultures, traditions, and ways of thinking. It promotes understanding, empathy, and respect for others’ experiences and perspectives. Embracing diversity in a dormitory setting prepares you to thrive in a globalised world, where cross-cultural understanding and collaboration are increasingly important.

29. Increased Accountability:

Living in a dormitory encourages accountability as you navigate shared spaces, communal living, and shared responsibilities. This environment encourages a sense of accountability as you learn to respect and consider the needs of others. Taking ownership of your actions, being mindful of shared resources, and demonstrating consideration for fellow residents fosters a sense of accountability beyond your college years. It cultivates a responsible and respectful attitude that can positively impact your personal and professional life.

30. Lasting Memories:

Living in a dormitory creates a unique and vibrant experience with lasting memories. Late-night conversations, impromptu gatherings, and shared experiences with dorm mates forge bonds that can last a lifetime. The proximity and shared living environment foster a sense of camaraderie and create a supportive community. These memories and connections formed in the dormitory become cherished parts of your college experience, contributing to personal growth and a sense of belonging.

Living in a dormitory offers many advantages that contribute to personal growth, academic success, and vibrant social life. From convenience and proximity to campus resources to developing life skills and a diverse community, the dormitory experience profoundly shapes your college years. Embrace the dorm life, and make the most of its opportunities for a truly transformative journey.

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Living in a dormitory as a freshman.

890 words | 3 page(s)

Freshmen are confronted with many choices when they start college. Perhaps the most important of those choices is where they should live. Some colleges forces students to live on campus for the first year because they want students to get to know the area. Others give their students the choice about where to live. Living in a dormitory as a freshman is the right decisions for new students because it puts them closer to class, allows them to meet people, and provides some structure while students are adjusting to college life.

One of the challenges for students is to learn how to go to class on their own. In high school, students are often taken to school by their parents. If they do not go to school, they might get in trouble with the school, with their parents, or even with the police. What this means is that students have every reason to go to class, and they are not really required to motivate themselves. Things are much different in college. On the first day, students find out that they do not even have to attend every class. Some teachers have no attendance policy and post all of the material online anyway. Students could just sit at home and read the notes the next day without ever going to class. When students live in a dorm, they are closer to their classes. On those days when they might not feel like getting into a car, they can walk right down to their classes and get all of the education that they need. This also helps on those days when the weather might not be good. When it is really cold, really hot, or raining, a student is much more likely to go to class if that student lives right in the dorm.

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College can be a hard adjustment time because a student is required to make new friends. Even if a student goes to a college where lots of his friends are going, the student will still need to be social and form some friendships during that first few months. Living in a dorm gives students access to immediate friends. People on dorm halls often play games together and go out together. With this in mind, a student who chooses to live in the dorms can then meet new people who might know the other people in the dorms. For a person who does not live in a dorm, it will be much more difficult and expensive to meet friends. That person might have to join clubs around campus or even join a fraternity or sorority. On the dorm hall, the friends are right there. They can turn into study buddies or they might even be people to support a student during the tough times that happen during the first year of college. In this way, a dorm can provide the type of experience that a simple apartment can never match.

It also makes sense to live in a dorm because a dorm provides a ton of structure for students. There are RAs who can watch the students a little bit and make sure that they do not get into too much trouble. On top of that, a dorm setting will ensure that students do not get too wild during their first year. It might be tempting to drink or do other things during the first year, and students can find themselves in a lot of trouble if they get involved in that stuff. A dorm will provide the kind of structure that can keep students focused on their studies. For students who are not used to setting limits for themselves, this is a very important service offered by the typical dorm setting.

Lastly, a dorm will usually be cheaper than finding a house or apartment. In cities, dorms are almost always cheaper than finding an apartment. Even in college towns, there are big savings to living on campus. Students drive less, so they spend less on gas. They also might not need to buy a parking pass if they live in a dorm during the first year. Lastly, dorms themselves typically have cheaper rent than what one might pay out on the open market. They can also be covered by student aid, including loans, grants, or scholarships. With the rising cost of college, students would be wise to do everything possible to keep their costs down. Living in a dorm is a big step toward that, and it is something that any smart student will consider.

There are lots of options that a person has when he or she starts college. While it might be tempting to want to live away from college, staying in a dorm during the first year is the best idea for all students. The dorm will make it easier for students to get to class or get to the library in order to study. In addition, being in a dorm will provide motivation on those days when getting in the car seems like too much. Likewise, dorms provide the opportunity for students to meet up with other students during those early weeks. When you add in the structure of the dorms, the supervision, and the cost, it becomes clear why all students should live in a dorm during their first year away at college.

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Ielts writing task 2 sample 181 - compare the advantages of living in university housing with the advantages of living in an apartment, ielts writing task 2/ ielts essay:, students at universities often have a choice of places to live. they may choose to live in university dormitories, or they may choose to live in apartments in the community. compare the advantages of living in university housing with the advantages of living in an apartment in the community. where would you prefer to live.

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I was poor and gay — and my childhood revolved around hiding that

In a personal essay, NBC News correspondent Steven Romo shares how releasing his secrets became his superpower. 

Standing in the airport fidgeting with my plastic, TV reporter earpiece, my camera crew is setting up to interview a traveler when she fills the brief silence by asking, “How does your wife like New York?”

It’s a small conversational crossroads I’ve faced many times. Is it easier for this quick interview to just not correct her that I have a husband instead of a wife? Still, I find myself answering in milliseconds, “My husband is still adjusting, I think. He does miss driving and good Tex-Mex though.”

“Oh, sorry! Husband. My own husband doesn’t even have a driver’s license. Never needed one,” she says, continuing the conversation without much of a pause.

With the camera’s red light on, I ask about her travel delays. Then when we’re finished recording, she says with a slight chuckle, “I actually didn’t fly until I was in my 40s. Grew up dirt poor. Just didn’t want to say that on camera.”

I find myself faced with another coming out.

“You’re not alone there. I actually grew up poor too. My first plane ride was in my 30s, but I had to use about three different credit cards to pay for it. You probably made better choices than I did.”

We laugh a bit more, I thank her for chatting and she disappears out of the sliding glass door.

But this airport encounter, though brief, stuck with me — a reminder that honesty, even about something seemingly inconsequential like marital status or family background, could make me feel so fond of an absolute stranger. It was a sense of simple connection that I’d spent years robbing myself of with constant pretense, trying to not stand out.

Flipping through the scant photos that survived my roach-infested childhood, I can’t help but smile at the greasy-haired kid staring back at me. He had no idea the parts of himself he hated would turn out to be exactly what saved him. What I wanted most back then was to be normal — to fit in. No matter how hard I tried and schemed, I never quite got there. My family and I always seemed to stand out. I was usually one of only a few Latino students in my classes. It was much more than that, though. While other kids were getting dropped off at school by minivans glazed in blue, the jalopies that I arrived in were decorated with rust spots and cracked windows. And when most classmates were wearing crisp, new back-to-school clothes, I was washing my own clothes in the bathroom sink and using a permanent marker to try to resuscitate my faded, formerly black jeans.

Hiding many of these differences was just not possible. But that didn’t keep me from trying — scheming — to hide who I really was. Tall tales about my “wealthy parents” forcing me to wear dirty, ragged clothes to keep me humble didn’t fool classmates for very long. So, I reverted to secrecy and aloofness. Those were some of the earliest things I learned at home — my first language in a way. It’s not something I was explicitly taught, like how to tie my shoes. These were skills I picked up by watching my parents. When someone came to the front door, I learned to freeze in place so the visitor would think no one was home. This was all an effort, to varying degrees of success, to hide what was going on behind that flimsy door.

Trying to explain the conditions of the house seems simple. We had five or six dogs that never went outside. They used the carpet as their bathroom. And the fast food trash piled up over any surface that could hold it. The predictable roach infestation followed. My mom, who ended up passing away while I was in college, had mental health struggles she never truly got help for.  My dad worked as a big rig driver. That left my siblings and me to navigate the chaos on our own.

But then around fifth grade, a new secret I learned about myself made me feel even more alone. Just as many of the other boys started to show interest in girls, I figured out I was gay. I fought it. I tried to will myself straight. I tried to pray myself “normal.” When that didn’t work, I resorted to what felt most natural to me anyway: I decided to hide it.

Projecting this false self into the world every waking moment wasted so much time and energy. And worse, it kept me perpetually at a distance from everyone else. There was always an invisible wall manifested in lies and half-truths. I see that now in these photos showing younger me’s big brown eyes. He was so full of worry and doubt that no kid should have had to carry.

Of course, it wasn’t until I shared these secrets that I was able to wriggle out from under their weight and finally breathe. In high school, I told my best friend about the situation at home. He told me it wasn’t my fault. After I got my first job in news, I told my sister I was gay. She told me she’d already figured that out, and we grew even closer. Coming out freed me. I finally gave myself permission to meet more LGBTQ+ people, and I learned that queer joy is even more powerful than queer sorrow.

Coming out freed me. I finally gave myself permission to meet more LGBTQ+ people, and I learned that queer joy is even more powerful than queer sorrow.

It wasn’t until I stopped trying to blend in that I realized these differences are what gave me the tools I needed to make it. Being an outsider proved to be a gift in disguise. If you’re lucky, feeling isolated can lead to self-reliance, and that helped me navigate my way out of my upbringing. And now covering the news, I get to connect with not only other LGBTQ+ people in their own lived experiences but also others who exist on the margins — the overlooked, the people who feel different. I have the honor of speaking with them in a way others may not be able to. Like interviewing Kate and Trish Varnum, the first same-sex couple to marry in Iowa , and truly understanding their fresh fears about anti-LGBTQ+ legislative proposals targeting their union. Or reporting on a surge of GoFundMe campaigns raising money for same-sex couples’ fertility care , because some insurance companies use definitions that leave them without adequate coverage.

It turns out, all those things I spent so much time and energy resisting and hiding as a kid have given me superpowers as an adult. And the radioactive spider? That turned out to be simple honesty, allowing me to spin webs of connection. Now, with each truth I share, with each story I tell, I can help bridge the divide between the margins and the blinding mainstream.

Sure, it’s not always easy. There were a lot of ups and downs along the way, like when I dropped out of high school, struggled with depression and constantly fought to make ends meet. And the flip side of that self-reliance sometimes manifests in distancing myself from those who love me. That’s something I’m still working on, and in some ways maybe I always will be.

Looking back at the grimy kid in these tattered photos, I see that while he might not have realized it, he was always meant to tell tales. Not ones to hide who he was or how he struggled, but about how he survived. And of finding the extraordinary strength in embracing the beautiful mess of who we truly are.

Steven Romo is a correspondent for NBC News based in New York City. You can follow his reporting and adventures on Instagram , X , TikTok and Facebook . 

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The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Going to College

Benjamin B. Bolger has spent his whole life amassing academic degrees. What can we learn from him?

Bolger has spent the last 30-odd years attending top universities. Credit...

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By Joseph Bernstein

• Published June 3, 2024 Updated June 5, 2024

Benjamin B. Bolger has been to Harvard and Stanford and Yale. He has been to Columbia and Dartmouth and Oxford, and Cambridge, Brandeis and Brown. Over all, Bolger has 14 advanced degrees, plus an associate’s and a bachelor’s. Some of Bolger’s degrees took many years to complete, such as a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Others have required rather less commitment: low-residency M.F.A.s from Ashland University and the University of Tampa, for example.

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Some produced microscopically specific research, like Bolger’s Harvard dissertation, “Deliberative Democratic Design: Participants’ Perception of Strategy Used for Deliberative Public Participation and the Types of Participant Satisfaction Generated From Deliberative Public Participation in the Design Process.” Others have been more of a grab bag, such as a 2004 master’s from Dartmouth, for which Bolger studied Iranian sociology and the poetry of Robert Frost.

He has degrees in international development, creative nonfiction and education. He has studied “conflict and coexistence” under Mari Fitzduff, the Irish policymaker who mediated during the Troubles, and American architecture under the eminent historian Gwendolyn Wright. He is currently working, remotely, toward a master’s in writing for performance from Cambridge.

Bolger is a broad man, with lank, whitish, chin-length hair and a dignified profile, like a figure from an antique coin. One of his favorite places is Walden Pond — he met his wife there, on one of his early-morning constitutionals — and as he expounds upon learning and nature, it is easy to imagine him back in Thoreau’s time, with all the other polymathic gentlemen, perhaps by lamplight, stroking their old-timey facial hair, considering propositions about a wide range of topics, advancing theories of the life well lived.

And there’s something almost anachronistically earnest, even romantic, about the reason he gives for spending the past 30-odd years pursuing college degrees. “I love learning,” he told me over lunch last year, without even a touch of irony. I had been pestering him for the better part of two days, from every angle I could imagine, to offer some deeper explanation for his life as a perpetual student. Every time I tried, and failed, I felt irredeemably 21st-century, like an extra in a historical production who has forgotten to remove his Apple Watch.

“I believe that people are like trees,” he said. “I hope I am a sequoia. I want to grow for as long as possible and reach toward the highest level of the sky.”

Against a backdrop of pervasive cynicism about the nature of higher education, it is tempting to dismiss a figure like Bolger as the wacky byproduct of an empty system. Then again, Bolger has run himself through that system, over and over and over again; it continues to take him in, and he continues to return to it for more. In fact, there is reportedly only one person in the United States with more college degrees than Bolger, and the vast majority of those came from universities within the state of Michigan (no disrespect to the Broncos, Eagles or Lakers). Because Bolger is just 48, and Michael Nicholson, of Kalamazoo, is 83, Bolger could surpass him, according to back-of-envelope math, as soon as 2054. In other words, Bolger is on a plausible track to becoming the country’s single most credentialed individual — at which point, perhaps, he could rest.

A proposition: No one more fully embodies the nature of elite American higher education today, in all its contradictions, than a man who has spent so much time being molded by it, following its incentives and internalizing its values. But what are those values, exactly? Of course, there are the oft-cited, traditional virtues of spending several years set apart from the rest of the world, reading and thinking. You know: the chance to expand your mind, challenge your preconceptions and cultivate a passion for learning. In this vision, eager minds are called to great institutions to reach their intellectual potential, and we know these institutions can perform this function simply because they are called Harvard and Yale.

That may be the way a prestigious education works for some, but probably not most. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that 41 percent — 41 percent! — were entering careers in consulting or finance. The same percentage were graduating to a starting salary of at least $110,000, more than double the national median. Last year, the most popular majors at Stanford were economics and computer science. The ultimate value of college for many is the credential, guaranteeing a starting spot many rungs up the ladder of worldly success: Nothing you learn at an elite university is as important as the line on your C.V. that you’ve paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to type. And if you were feeling cynical, you could argue that the time you spend applying to college will affect the rest of your life more than anything in particular that happens while you’re there.

“It is only when we forget our learning that we begin to know,” Thoreau observed, famously, after his experiment in simple living. (Though, rich of Thoreau: he went to Harvard.) In a much different, much opposed way — one involving central heat — Bolger has spent the past three decades conducting his own half-mad American experiment in education. He has drunk deeper at the well of the university than almost anyone else. What does he know?

In 1978, Bolger was 2, riding in a Buick Riviera in Durand, Mich., when the car was hit by a drunken driver. He was basically fine, but his parents were seriously injured, and his mother, Loretta, spent months in the hospital, ending up with a metal plate in one of her legs. She had to leave her job as a schoolteacher. Bolger’s parents’ marriage disintegrated. His mother could be difficult, and his father, an engineer and patent lawyer who represented himself during the nasty divorce, was emotionally abusive. Bolger and his mother began splitting time between their comfortable home near Flint and his grandfather’s ramshackle farm in Grand Haven, which was so drafty they sometimes curled up by the wood-burning furnace.

Bolger’s mother spent much of her money in the ensuing custody battle, and her stress was worsened by her son’s severe dyslexia. In third grade, when Bolger still couldn’t read, his teachers said he wouldn’t graduate from high school. Recognizing that her boy was bright, just different, his mother resolved to home-school him — though “home” is perhaps not the right word: The two spent endless hours driving, to science museums, to the elite Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit for drawing lessons, even to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. At night she read to him: epic works of literature like “War and Peace” but also choose-your-own-adventure books and “Star Wars” novelizations.

The pair passed days in the library at Michigan State University, watched campus speakers in the evening and ate free at the receptions afterward. Sometimes, rather than drive the two hours back to Grand Haven, they would sleep in his mother’s pickup truck somewhere in East Lansing and do the same thing the next day.

“I saw the university as a home,” Bolger says.

Bolger wore secondhand clothes and had only one close friend his age. Yet he felt he was on a grand adventure. At 11, he began taking classes at Muskegon Community College. Still reading below a third-grade level, Bolger needed his mother to read his assigned texts out loud; he dictated papers back to her. At 16, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, moving with her into an off-campus apartment. He recorded his lectures so he could listen to them at home; his mother still read to him. Majoring in sociology, he graduated with a 4.0. He was 19.

Next, Bolger decided to apply to law school because of his admiration for the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, whose crusade for safer vehicles resonated with Bolger after his accident as a toddler. He was administered the LSAT questions orally and was admitted to Harvard, Stanford and Yale.

At Yale Law School, Bolger floundered. The method Bolger and his mother had devised to cover reading assignments fell apart: There was so much of it, and it was so detailed. Bolger’s age made him a kind of celebrity on campus, and not in a good way. Classmates found him bombastic and insecure. “He was 19, and I suppose he acted it,” says Andrea Roth, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was friendly with Bolger at the time. Bolger failed two classes his first semester and dropped out.

To attend Yale, Bolger had deferred a master’s program in sociology at Oxford, so in 1996, he moved to England. There, he thrived under the tutorial system, which reminded him of home-schooling. Then he just kept going, embarking on an odyssey through the Anglosphere’s great universities, during which he improved his reading but still leaned on his mother. From Oxford, he went to Cambridge, where he took a master’s in sociology and politics. After three years in Britain, Bolger moved to California, where he studied for a master’s in interdisciplinary education from Stanford, and then quickly to New York, where he got another master’s, in the politics of education, as well as a master’s degree in real estate development, both from Columbia, in a single academic year. He found time in the summers to work toward a master’s of arts in liberal studies from Dartmouth. He slept four hours a night.

And he kept on stacking degrees: a master’s in design studies with a real estate concentration from Harvard; a master’s in international development from Brown; the “coexistence and conflict” master’s from Brandeis; a master’s from Skidmore, where he studied “positive psychology”; all culminating in his doctorate in design, focused on urban planning and real estate, from Harvard in 2007. More recently, Bolger has done a trio of M.F.A.s in which he said he learned how to write “in a compelling narrative way,” “how to communicate stories in a compelling and gripping way” and how to delve deep into “the different genres of writing.” He has worked as an adjunct or visiting professor at more than a dozen colleges to fund his endless pursuit of learning.

One thing Bolger has not seemed to learn over the years is to introspect. Why has he driven himself to this extent — to place himself over and over in the kinds of impractical programs young adults enter to wait out a bad economy or delay the onset of adulthood à la National Lampoon’s Van Wilder? Many of us love learning, too, but we don’t do what Bolger has done; we listen to history podcasts on our commutes or pick our way through long books in the minutes before sleep. Despite all his degrees, Bolger has never sought a tenure-track job — only a few of his degrees would even qualify him for such a position — and he has never really specialized.

Unless you consider putting together a killer college application a form of expertise, which both the market and Bolger do.

Over the past 35 years, acceptance rates to the United States’ most elite universities have shrunk to about 6 percent from nearly 30 percent. Students, frightened by those numbers, are applying to more colleges than ever and making these numbers more frightening in the process. At the same time, overtaxed counselors don’t have the time to help as much as applicants and parents want. The rise of so-called holistic admissions, which look beyond grades and test scores, has also contributed to a sense that there is a “secret sauce” to getting into exclusive colleges and turbocharged demand for people who can demystify it.

After he got his doctorate in 2007, Bolger became a full-time private college-admissions consultant. “No other consultant has Dr. Bolger’s record of success,” reads his website — a claim that is difficult to verify, yet one that many people seem to believe. Four years with Bolger runs at least $100,000. (In the world of elite college coaching , this isn’t exceptional: A five-year plan from the New York firm Ivy Coach costs as much as $1.5 million.) Over the past 15 years, he has developed a coaching style he compares with that of Bill Belichick, Mr. Miyagi and Yoda.

On a humid morning late last summer, Bolger saw clients in an upstairs room at the ‘Quin House, a modish Back Bay members’ club in an ornate Commonwealth Avenue limestone. He has a home office in Cambridge but prefers to work as much as he can out of the private clubs to which he belongs, including the staid Union Club, opposite Boston Common, and the Harvard Club, which feels loosey-goosey by comparison.

That day he was meeting with Anjali Anand, a sunny then-17-year-old who was in Boston for the summer to do research at Boston University; and Vivian Chen, also 17 at the time, also sunny, also in Boston to study on B.U.’s campus. Anjali and Vivian faced a brutal fact: For young strivers of the American upper middle class, credentials and a can-do attitude are no longer sufficient for entry into the top tiers of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings. These accomplishments must be arranged into stories so compelling that they stand out from the many other compelling stories of the teenagers clamoring for admission.

And so Bolger devoted the meetings to teaching self-narrativization, particularly as it relates to the all-important essay component of the application. He encouraged the high-achieving Anjali to be vulnerable. “Someone who is 100 percent confident with no hesitations isn’t as compelling,” he said. “This is why there are more movies made about Batman than Superman.” With Vivian, he tried to connect her desire to become a dentist to a deeper narrative thread.

“Why the mouth and teeth?” Bolger asked.

Bolger said his business has enabled him to mix with “the 1 percent crowd.” In addition to his condo on Cambridge’s tony Memorial Drive, Bolger owns a house in Virginia and his family farm in Michigan. He has an Amex invite-only Centurion card. In 2016, he donated more than $50,000 to support Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for which he received a special Jeff Koons print; more recently, he has donated more than $2,500 to the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He loves to attend celebrity talks: Bruce Springsteen, George Clooney, Joe Montana — anyone who, in his mind, defines a category.

Bolger carries about 25 clients at a time, but his most important pupil is his 9-year-old daughter, Benjamina, whom he home-schools and considers his best friend. Bolger models his daughter’s education after his own: hands-on, interactive, wide-ranging, lots of time in the car. (Bolger’s son, Blitze, is also being home-schooled, but he’s only 4, so there’s less to do.) His wife, Anil, who helps him recruit clients, is happy to let him oversee the liberal-arts component of their children’s education while she handles math and Chinese. Bolger is trying to be less intense than his mother, to emphasize the development of his daughter’s emotional intelligence. But one of his main pedagogical devices is still the field trip.

On another bright morning last summer, Bolger took Benjamina to Concord’s North Bridge, for a holistic lesson but also a lesson in holism. He was joined there by his friend Dan Sullivan, a fellow polymath, who has also collected a staggering number of credentials. (The 42 entries under the “Experience” section of his LinkedIn page include Ambassador at the Parliament of the World’s Religions and Colonel at the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels.) Bolger had planned a discussion around bridges and diplomacy. But he believes the world is “nonlinear,” and his habits of speech reflect this. There were digressions into history, comparative government, union organizing, car safety, Robert McNamara, the strength of triangles, the cryogenic preservation of corpses.

A composed, precocious and sweet girl, Benjamina followed her tutors across the bridge and to the bronze statue of a Minute Man, inscribed with Emerson’s “Concord Hymn.” There the three of them stood in contemplation, looking a little like a child star and her security detail.

“Was that shot actually heard around the world?” Bolger asked.

“I don’t think so,” Benjamina replied.

“Yes,” Bolger said. “So this is an example of a metaphor.”

​​After stopping in Concord for a bite, Bolger and Benjamina drove the two miles to Walden Pond. The pair sat on a wooden plank above the beach on the pond’s east side. Except for the sounds of teenagers flirting and retirees shifting in folding chairs, it was quiet. Bolger explained Thoreau, the woods, the essential facts.

“I don’t know if you find this inspirational or not,” Bolger said. “I have the ability to pretend no one is here.”

Benjamina made a skeptical noise.

“I guess I could do it for a week,” Bolger said. “A year just seems too long.”

Thoreau’s experiment made him one of the most important men in American history. Bolger’s experiment has, well, not done that. Instead, it has done something even weirder. To spend any time around Bolger is to feel that you have been enrolled in a bespoke, man-shaped university, one capable of astonishing interdisciplinary leaps, and it basically all hangs together — the way that any mix of freshman electives at a top university might complement one another, might rhyme, produce its own sort of harmony. It is unclear what, exactly, is at the center. But there are gravitational forces at work nonetheless.

Also, Bolger’s experiment has made him a wildly compelling father to a daughter who, it must be said, is exceptional. She is fluent in two languages, she is nice, she is funny, and last summer she performed Fritz Kreisler’s thorny violin piece “Sicilienne and Rigaudon” at Carnegie Hall with grace, élan and even wit. At the very least, Benjamina has on her hands the material for one of the all-time great college-admissions essays.

The day after their colonial field trip, father and daughter had lunch at the Harvard Club. Surrounded by dark wood and wine refrigerators, they ordered off the Veritas menu: Bolger had a B.L.T., and Benjamina had a hamburger with fries. The meat arrived on a bun with an “H” grill mark, for Harvard.

“Do you think the burger looks better because it has an ‘H’ on it?” Bolger asked.

Benjamina didn’t hesitate. “Yes!”

Read by Robert Petkoff

Narration produced by Anna Diamond and Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by Devin Murphy

Source for illustration at the top: Photographs from the Bolger family; Arnold Gold/The New Haven Register, via Associated Press.

David Hilliard is an artist and educator from Boston. He creates narrative multipaneled photographs, often based on his life or the lives of people around him.

An earlier version of this article misidentified one of the degrees that Benjamin B. Bolger earned from Columbia University. It is a master’s degree in real estate development, not in architecture.

How we handle corrections

Joseph Bernstein is a Times reporter who writes feature stories for the Styles section. More about Joseph Bernstein

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