<p>to kyletx:</p>
<p>if you’re going to apply for substance-free housing, you should do it because you really, really want to live in a non-substance-abusing dorm, not because you just don’t object to it. i’d like to say that living in johnson isn’t very different from living in the other freshman dorms, but that simply isn’t the case.</p>
<p>while i wouldn’t say that living in johnson is “some sort of brand that people around campus know you by,” i might say that it’s a sort of brand that people DON’T know you by, if that makes any sense. wake is a reasonably small school, and you tend to recognize a lot of people, so if an unrecognizeable person is spotted, someone might offer the semi-condescending explanation of, “they probably live in johnson.” the fact is, for many people on campus johnson is associated with people who don’t go out and are very antisocial, and while this stereotype, from my experience with “johnsonites”, isn’t accurate, it’s still the idea a lot of wake students have. the only truth behind it is that yes, johnson students are less likely to drink and, yes, as a result are less likely to go out to parties, etc. for a person interested in going out a lot and meeting a lot of people (whether drinking or not), i wouldn’t recommend living in johnson, simply because it’s more difficult to find out about the social events at the beginning of the year where most people i know met the people they ended up hanging out with for the rest of the year and the rest of college. it’s not impossible, but from what i can tell it’s more difficult, simply because these things tend to travel by word of mouth more than anything, and it’s hard to get information from students around you who aren’t interested.</p>
<p>as far as greek life and johnson is concerned… i don’t see a very high percentage of women in sororities who live/d in johnson. there are a number of reasonable reasons for this, the foremost being that a lot of people (whether accurately or inaccurately) associate greek life with alcohol, and logically there are a lot of johnson students who don’t drink and, as a result, aren’t interested. there’s also the fact that a decent part of getting into a sorority comes from knowing members, and as i already mentioned, people i know who lived in johnson have told me it’s more difficult to meet people when you live there as a freshman. sorority rush goes by in less than a week, so you don’t really get to know people well during rush.
for men it’s different; as far as i’ve witnessed, living in johnson isn’t really detrimental to men rushing a fraternity, since the first time freshmen are allowed to rush a fraternity is also in the second semester. by that time, if a person really is determined to go to parties and such, they are doing it; their knowledge of social events is no longer dependent on the people living around them. men’s rush is a couple weeks long, so while sorority women can’t really get to know rushees, men get to know those rushing their fraternities pretty well.</p>
<p>hopefully that made some sense, if there are any questions, please ask.</p>