withano

I'm a rising sophomore about to live in Jones for a second year, and I have a sort of love-hate relationship with it. People in Jones tend to be extremely friendly and welcoming, and I love going to Jones events with them. Most Jonesians (as we like to call ourselves) are either in Comm or Bienen, and almost everyone has an interest in theatre. As a non-theatre major, I especially enjoyed that Jones could keep me connected to the theatre community in a way that I couldn't get at any other dorm. I saw a hell of a lot more theatre than my friends in bigger dorms, but the free shows in the Great Room easily saved me at least $100.

By the same token, Jonesians can get really cliquey and insular, and some fairly exclusive groups of friends formed by the end of fall quarter. I definitely recommend trying to make more friends from outside of Jones, since a lot of these cliques got really sick of each other by the end of the year. Either that, or their members started dating, which was awkward (all the incest couples I know of in Jones are guy/girl pairs - Jones isn't quite as gay as it has a reputation for being, unfortunately). From what CCCollegiate says, it sounds like CRC is the same way. And, for the record, the rooms in Jones are just as small as the ones in CRC, since the basic set up is the same, but both dorms (and 1835 Hinman and ISRC) have communal suite areas where there's a little more room to breathe.

Jones has a reputation for being somewhat freakish and it's not as popular to go to frat parties and the like as it is in other dorms, and I definitely feel like living in Jones hurt me during sorority rush. Sisters would ask me, "So where do you live on campus?" and when I answered them, they'd ask me if I wanted to live there, or if I just got put there. I could tell most of them wanted to say I'd been put there, since a lot of them made a weird face when I said I'd preffed Jones on my housing survey. I was one of only a handful of Jones girls rushing, and I don't know of a guy in Jones who rushed a frat other than Phi Mu alpha the music frat. I eventually dropped out of rush, but that's a story for another thread.

Conclusion: Jones is definitely not your typical dorm. I had a lot of problems with it my first year, but I figured the pros outweighed the cons, and I'll be putting in another year.

gowildcats

In response to this thread, I feel like many people get a wrong idea about residential colleges. I was very close to requesting living in one, and am very happy I didn't. While Slivka is brand new and hard to get into, most of the other residential colleges usually are very mixed. This year, with a larger freshman class, many people did not get even dorms from their top five list and were put in random residential colleges. I even have friends who requested one and ended up being in one, and not liking it at all. While they are way smaller than a residential hall, they really limit you socially. It does give you a chance to bond with a small amount of people, but I feel like it really puts you at a disadvantage especially if you don't click with a lot of people in your dorm. On another end of the spectrum, I know people randomly placed in a res college who fell in love with it, and loved all the people they lived with and are living there again next year. One of the weird things about that is that this decision had nothing to do with the theme of the res college rather than the people and building and sense of community they felt living there. I think the university really just tries to play up the idea of res colleges while they do not even come close to the tight communities at res colleges at schools such as Yale and Rice. The res college system at Northwestern has a lot of flaws, and the university could do a lot more to improve it.