Community at U of C

JHS
Thu, 21 Apr 2011 07:06:26 +0000

From my visit to Chicago I got the impression that a lot of the community revolves around your house.

That is certainly true for some people, and some houses (see Rny2’s post), and just as certainly not true for other people, and most houses. The marketing places more emphasis on this than reality would bear out. Also, I think you would see a different balance in April than you saw in October, and you would definitely see a different balance if you were talking to third-years vs. first-years. The house system is a great help to forming communities for kids who want to use it that way, but kids who don’t need their social lives to revolve around their houses have perfectly good social lives that don’t revolve around their houses.

Concrete example: Scav teams are mostly organized by dorm. Scav has been incredibly important to one of my kids. And he never scavved with his dorm’s team. His scav friends were mostly in another dorm, and so he would effectively move in there for scav, and he actually had a leadership position on the scav team for a dorm where he never lived (and didn’t even like going to, except during scav).