Dorm Living

When high school students think of college life, images of parties and new people and late-night pizza instantly come to mind. Only upon moving in does a freshman realize the buzz-killing downside to the blissful freedom: a 12 x 12 dorm room often shared with a stranger. With Knack Dorm Living, Casey Lewis—herself a college senior at the University of Missouri—provides the guide she searched for, in vain, in her freshman year. She offers invaluable tips on what to pack and what to buy, what to expect, decorating, clothes, and organizing time and money. This is an ideal high school graduation gift for high school seniors—both girls and guys—set to move away from home.

Cramped quarters, homesick roommates, and endless hours of schoolwork are just some of the challenges that can make living in a college dorm a stressful experience. Transform your small, concrete block of a room into a comfortable and productive living space using the ancient Chinese art of feng shui. Offering a variety of quick and inexpensive solutions, this guide will help you prioritize your most pressing problems, enhance your dorm room’s chi, and create a living arrangement that encourages positivity.

Get ready for the best years of your life! College Survival: Roommates and Dorm Life contains everything you need to know about living with a new person. With advice from the realities of dorm life, making contact with your roommate, settling disputes, and the importance of keeping a clean room, you’ll have a great first semester—and maybe even a life-long friendship!

An exploration of the architecture of dormitories that exposes deeply held American beliefs about education, youth, and citizenship Every fall on move-in day, parents tearfully bid farewell to their beloved sons and daughters at college dormitories: it is an age-old ritual. The residence hall has come to mark the threshold between childhood and adulthood, housing young people during a transformational time in their lives. Whether a Gothic stone pile, a quaint Colonial box, or a concrete slab, the dormitory is decidedly unhomelike, yet it takes center stage in the dramatic arc of many American families. This richly illustrated book examines the architecture of dormitories in the United States from the eighteenth century to 1968, asking fundamental questions: Why have American educators believed for so long that housing students is essential to educating them? And how has architecture validated that idea? Living on Campus is the first architectural history of this critical building type. Grounded in extensive archival research, Carla Yanni’s study highlights the opinions of architects, professors, and deans, and also includes the voices of students. For centuries, academic leaders in the United States asserted that on-campus living enhanced the moral character of youth; that somewhat dubious claim nonetheless influenced the design and planning of these ubiquitous yet often overlooked campus buildings. Through nuanced architectural analysis and detailed social history, Yanni offers unexpected glimpses into the past: double-loaded corridors (which made surveillance easy but echoed with noise), staircase plans (which prevented roughhousing but offered no communal space), lavish lounges in women’s halls (intended to civilize male visitors), specially designed upholstered benches for courting couples, mixed-gender saunas for students in the radical 1960s, and lazy rivers for the twenty-first century’s stressed-out undergraduates. Against the backdrop of sweeping societal changes, communal living endured because it bolstered networking, if not studying. Housing policies often enabled discrimination according to class, race, and gender, despite the fact that deans envisioned the residence hall as a democratic alternative to the elitist fraternity. Yanni focuses on the dormitory as a place of exclusion as much as a site of fellowship, and considers the uncertain future of residence halls in the age of distance learning.

The Ultimate Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the Dorm Dorm life offers you a great chance to meet new people and try new things. But leaving the comforts of home for the first time to enter the roommate-having, small-room-sharing, possibly-coed-bathroom-using world of the dorms can be overwhelming and intimidating. The College Dorm Survival Guide offers expert advice and the inside scoop on: • Choosing the right residence hall for you • Getting along with your roommate (and handling conflict) • Bathroom, laundry, and dining hall survival • Dealing with stress, depression, and safety issues From avoiding the dreaded Freshman 15 to decorating your space, this informative and funny guide gives experts' advice on everything you need to know to enjoy dorm living to the fullest.