Hill vs. Quad; Dinning Dollars vs. Dinninghall Visits

chrisw
Fri, 06 Apr 2012 09:39:55 +0000

Meal Plan breakdown:


Visits can be used at Hill dining hall, Commons dining hall and King’s Court dining hall; visits + some extra dining dollars can be used at Hillel
Dining Dollars can be used at Houston Market, at the little market inside the Quad, at Mark’s Cafe in the library, in the retail establishments at Commons, at ABP in Huntsman and at a wide array of other places on and around campus (there used to be a pizza place on Spruce Street, unaffiliated with the university, that accepted dining dollars)


Realistically, you will probably find yourself getting dinner in a dining hall and lunch at Houston or at a food cart, unless you’re very disciplined about eating in the dining halls all the time. This means that you will probably use 80-100 out of 125 meals each semester. At the end of the semester, your meals die, but your dining dollars carry over, so it makes sense to have fewer meals and more dining dollars.

Freshman year, I hardly went to the dining halls first semester; I was always eating at food trucks, retail places near campus and restaurants downtown (there are a TON of places college kids can afford!). At the end of the semester, I had used around 60 meals and only half of my dining dollars… it took a concerted effort to get anywhere CLOSE to using all of my second semester meals. I wound up using all of my dining dollars, even though I had the plan with the most dining dollars available.

Regarding housing…

The Quad is the place freshmen want to be, but here is my experience from Hill.

First off, it sucked. Straight up, the facilities were beyond terrible; we had two common rooms on our hall, one of which had no functioning lighting and the other of which had a sizable lake in the middle for two months before our pleas for help were answered. Showers didn’t work, had slow drains and occasionally decided to spew water in people’s faces from places that water should not spew. The ventilation system has probably never been cleaned, so regardless of how much effort I put into keeping my dorm clean, it was covered in dust within two days.

WITH ALL OF THAT SAID, our hatred for the facilities of Hill gave my hallmates and me something to bond over. Since our rooms were so tiny, we always hung out elsewhere (usually in the common room with the lake in the middle). Many of us have remained friends since we moved out of Hill in 2008; we all graduated last year and moved to different places arond the country (New York, California, the Midwest, Boston and Philly, to name just a few places), but we see each other relatively frequently, including some random occasions (i.e. not just university-sponsored alumni events).

In retrospect, I HATED living in Hill, but it had such a positive formative effect on me that, were I to do it again, I would have done everything the same way.