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I logged into my Notre Dame account today and saw the best little email headline ever: “2007-2008 Housing Assignment.” I’ve been dying to find out where the heck I’ll be living next year, my anticipation growing as all my friends either picked their roommates themselves or found out their housing assignments at orientations back in June.
The wait has been especially agonizing because Notre Dame’s campus places a lot of emphasis on the dorm community. Freshman are placed randomly in a single-sex dorm, and are expected to stay in the same one all for years, or at least until they move into off-campus housing junior or senior year. With no Greek organizations, the dorms are the sororities and fraternities, developing fierce identities and even fiercer rivalries through intramural competitions. Comparing the different dorms at Notre Dame to the houses at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books is a pretty good way to describe the atmosphere and the connection students feel to their respective dorms.
I originally wanted to be in Badin, a small dorm that was originally a men’s hall before the school went co-ed. I stayed with some girls there when I visited the school in February, and part of the reason I fell in love with Notre Dame was because Badin just exuded a sense of “collegeness” – the old, traditional kind, with high ceilings, wooden staircases, old-fashioned doorknobs – silly things that inspire intense devotion in someone who is obsessed with aesthetics.
When I found out that room assignments were completely random, I was not a little bit afraid I would be stuck in the “Mod Quad,” the group of dorms built in the 1970s that are big, square, beige, and kind of ugly.
Luckily, though, I landed in McGlinn Hall, home of the Shamrocks (only the best dorm mascot ever for a school whose icon is a leprechaun). Although McGlinn opened in 1997, it looks a lot like the older dorms as far as architecture goes. Unlike those older dorms, though, McGlinn has air-conditioning, a laundry room, an exercise room, several large lounge areas, and easily accessible fire escapes. And … it’s very close to the dining hall! But that’s okay; I won’t gain any Freshman Fifteen with all those treadmills just three floors below me.
Besides the textbook tour of McGlinn, there is one other teensy detail that will impact my life next year – I’m in a “quad,” meaning I have three roommates. One is from Nicaragua, one is from Pennsylvania, and one is from New Orleans by way of Taipei. Pretty diverse, huh? I’ve already found them all on Facebook and I’m pretty excited about our room arrangement – two bedrooms connected by a center, social space. Some of hometown friends respond with disgust when I say I have three roommates, but I’d rather have that many than one or none, if only because I want to meet as many people as I can.
Another plus to having three roomies? One person can bring the fridge, one can bring the TV, someone else the futon … you get the idea.
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