<p>Sorry this is such a strange question but I just can’t stand noise. I have a hard time sleeping/studying with noise. Northfield seems like a nice rural place…</p>
<p>I live in CA & I can’t visit Carleton due to financial problems. I heard some people say that there’s a train at night…no…?</p>
<p>Thanks:)</p>
<p>You can request a room on the Quiet Floor, which I believe is in Nourse (someone correct me if I’m wrong). Nourse is pretty well buffered from the train (the tracks are to the west of campus, beyond the football field) and the geese on the lakes by Goodhue.</p>
<p>Yes, there is a train with a horn that blares at night. You can see the tracks on the Google map if you look up Carleton. The train noise isn’t as loud on east campus (Goodhue, Evans, Watson, Myers, Nourse) as on west campus (Burton, Sevy, Davis, Musser), but I lived in Goodhue my freshman year and I still remember needing a bit of time to adjust to sleeping through it.</p>
<p>Carleton has some designated quiet areas: 1st Davis and the Faculty Club buildings. Faculty Club is far from the train and creepily quiet (just creepy in general, actually), but a first-year student would not be allowed to live there. Sub-free floors tend to be quieter than other floors because people don’t throw parties on them, but you’ll still hear noise from adjacent floors or people nerding out over board or video games in the lounges.</p>
<p>The bottom floors of the Libe are quiet and students studying down there take the noise guidelines very seriously. If you want a noise-free environment to study in, the first floor of the Libe would be your place. The upper floors are much more social and have groups of people studying together and goofing off, but it’s all solo on the bottom level.</p>
<p>Other notable Carleton noise: the tornado siren testing on the first Wednesday of the month! Those go off in the middle of the day in class. Also, Primal Scream (10 pm the night before finals start), though pretty much every college in the country does some variation of that.</p>
<p>I think Carleton would be a better college than many for someone who likes quiet, but it is a social living environment, so you would have to address your sensitivities with some smart purchases: good headphones to block out noise when studying, comfortable earplugs for sleeping, and an aggressively vibrating alarm clock that you won’t sleep through. Obviously emphasizing a need for quiet on the roommate questionnaire would be a good idea, too.</p>
<p>My daughter has radar ears. I swear she can hear a flea hiccup half a mile away. She lived in Nourse as a freshman and is now in Evans, and not once have I heard her complain about noise. :)</p>