(Photo courtesy of: UMass Lowell) “Students enjoying their dorm.”
Shishir Javali
Connector Contributor
There are a lot of benefits and improvements to the residence halls, and students can enjoy the college experience, attend events, study, and live independently.
For the upcoming school year, there will not be any major renovations to the residence halls. Rather, they will be performing routine maintenance in the summer in preparation for the incoming students. With dorming, students also tend to study better, work harder, hang out on campus more and be more involved with the community.
“Every summer, we repaint rooms, and we do normal upkeep. But you wouldn’t see it like the outside of Riverview. It wouldn’t suddenly be pink. It wouldn’t be a change like that. Those are our normal practices when students leave. Someone damages a room,” says Danny Dela-Cuesta, an assistant director for communication for Residence Life.
Along with improvements to the residence halls, there are a lot of advantages for students who live on campus. Students can connect with peers, get to know people who live on their floor, hang out with students who live on the same floor, attend the same classes on campus, and study with their peers. There are several study rooms for students to study.
Kira Szliva, a junior and an education major who lives on campus says, “Living in a dorm is one of the best ways to make connections while you are at college. In class, it might be a little harder, especially if people leave right away or they are not interested or are commuting. I
think that when you live in a dorm, you meet so many different people, especially if you go random.”
When it comes to studying on campus, Szliva also says, “A lot of the dorms have study rooms, or there are just enough spaces in your dorm for you to go to like study, you could always go to your room, there’s the living room, and most dorms have a sort of study room area if you don’t want to stay on campus, there’s always that opportunity.”
Students who live on campus tend to perform better in their classes and have more enjoyable experiences studying. Students can get the college experience, and they also have easier access to campus amenities such as the Campus Recreation on East Campus.
Dela-Cuesta says, “Data shows that students who live on campus tend to graduate at a higher rate. They tend to have higher GPAs and graduate at a higher rate. They have more access to the on-campus resources, the CRC, and student activities events, and they tend to actually engage with those activities more than the off-campus students do”.
Living on campus also provides a lot of safety and security measures compared to living off-campus in an apartment. Every night, including weekends, a security guard sits at the desk to ensure the dorms are safe. Students get a resident advisor on every floor who will support them throughout college and make sure all students are safe.
Alex Rojas, a resident advisor of Riverview Suites, says, “My role as an RA is to make sure that the residents feel safe. If they are like, they have a place, or they can have someone to talk to
whenever they are in time of need. It also allows me to make the residents feel comfortable in their home away from home”.
Living on campus still provides a lot of support for students even though they do not have any parental supervision. Students get good experience of independent living and how to take care of themselves while they are on campus.
Rojas also says, “It allows you to have an idea of how it is to live in the real world by yourself and without parental supervision because that’s how it is in the real world. Like, you’re not going to have someone looking over you 24/7, and it allows you to find new ways to take care of yourself while still having a little bit of the support the school gives you”.
There are nine residence halls, three on the South campus and six on the East campus. On South Campus, there are Riverview Suites, Sheehy Hall, and Concordia Hall. On East Campus, there is Fox Hall, University Suites, Riverhawk Village, Donahue Hall, Leitch Hall, and Bourgeois Hall. Some are traditional-style residence halls where students have a bedroom but share a community bathroom. There are also several suite-style options where students have a living room, a bathroom, and a bedroom. There are also apartment-style residence halls on campus which have a full kitchen.
