<p>Stanley,
Just a few other things</p>
<ul>
<li><p>If you are paying for the room, you might as well give it a try, as other posters said. Remember, you can go home any night you choose. You can stay in the dorm 3 nights a week if you want, 1 night a week or whatever. Better still, stay in it every night for a while and if you don’t like it, you can move home anytime. That’s an option many students don’t have.</p></li>
<li><p>Listen to some of the rhetoric coming from certain posters on this forum, where they discuss the “college experience”. If you don’t live in the dorm, then people will be talking about this kind of thing to you in later years when you get a job and telling you how you missed out. Have you ever heard older people discuss their college days and how great it was? As time passes, they look back on things as if it were much rosier, your friends will probably do the same and remember it as better fun then it actually was.</p></li>
<li><p>If you live in the dorm for a while, you will then genuinely know that it isn’t really that great. That might sound funny, but if you don’t live in the dorm, you might wonder if you actually missed out on something great.</p></li>
<li><p>You will learn for sure what dorm life is really about, especially at Stanford. As I said in another post, they set it up to make each dorm like a sort of big family. You won’t find any romance between dormmates, which is referred to as dormcest and frowned upon at Stanford, a sort of unwritten rule, but making good friends is pretty easy most of the time. And it is usually with dormmates that the friendships are made. Often people don’t know many others outside of their own dorm building.</p></li>
<li><p>Alcohol also isn’t a big deal. I get the sense that you are a guy who doesn’t drink alcohol. You’ll find that maybe over half of the students don’t drink. There are also rules banning alcohol from all frosh dorm public areas, so there doesn’t be any alcohol in the frosh dorms unless someone sneaks it privately into their room. So that cuts out any peer pressure or any nonsense drinking games in dorm areas.
You could get drink at frat parties, but there isn’t that many of those. Considering the number of students, it seems that most don’t bother with them and I’ve known plenty of people to go to them and not drink there either.</p></li>
<li><p>The most important point to make is that dorm living is much worse after your frieshman year. They have something called The Draw. We won’t go into that, but lets just say it’s easier for you to try it out for the Freshman Year than trying it out later. So give it a try, and the bit of hardship of dorm life will make you more appreciative of things.</p></li>
</ul>