<p>I’ve heard abour riseley residential college, but is their main system residential or the house system?</p>
<p>Program houses like Risley are based on applications from interested students (although they also take students who aren’t able to be placed in regular housing due to space limitations). </p>
<p>Freshmen live on North Campus and are assigned rooms based on housing preferences (co-ed/women only, single/double/triple/quad, traditional dorms/townhouses, etc.) If upperclassmen choose to live on-campus, the West Campus housing system allows students to chose their own rooms based on a lottery. There are also a couple of dorms in Collegetown that upperclassmen can live in.</p>
<p>[Housing</a> - Housing Home](<a href=“Residential Life | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University”>Residential Life | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University)</p>
<p>Housing at Cornell is a jumble, let me try to navigate you through it:
- Freshmen year, all students are randomly placed into one of 11 dorms. These dorms range in age, architectural style, size, etc.
One of these is the townhouse community, which is a collection of small houses, each of which has a living room + kitchen on bottom floor, and two doubles and bathrooms on second floor.
The rest are the regular smattering of doubles/singles/other</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Sophomore year and beyond, you will be living on West Campus. West Campus has 5 Houses in the traditional House sense; each has a dining room, mailboxes, living areas with TVs, computers, etc.
There are also a number of Gothics, which are slightly older buildings that don’t have dining halls in them, but instead belong to a House, whose dining hall is their main, and where their mail comes. </p></li>
<li><p>Finally, there is a separate set of dorms called Program Houses, which are open to students from all years and all majors. Each house has a theme. Each house also has programming and events according to that theme and each house has a different set of facilities.
There is JAM (Just About Music) which has music rooms with instruments, etc.
There is the Ecology House which has an environmental vibe to it.
There is a Native American Heritage House, African/African-American Heritage House, Latino House, etc. Each of these houses have programming that relates to their specific history/heritage/culture etc.
There is Risley, which is the fine and performing arts house, and is in a really cool building with Pottery Studios, a theatre, etc.
There are also several houses for international students or students who want to learn new languages, etc.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>And that is a basic summary of the complicated housing setup at Cornell.</p>
<p>nice of you ^ thanks for that.</p>
<p>Great response Chendrix, very informative.</p>
<p>Additionally, a lot of sophomores, and some jrs and srs live in greek houses. There are also houses called co-ops that are essentially co-ed fraternity style living with increase responsibilities (IE, all residents have chores like cooking or cleaning). Co-ops have a distinct granola-crunchy-hippy vibe to them. IMHO, The majority of juniors and seniors rent houses or apartments (with their friends they have met in the greek/co-op/program house/west campus circles) on north campus, west campus, or in collegetown.</p>
<p>Yeah basically what you have is:</p>
<p>1) All freshman live on North, either through a traditional dorm or a program house</p>
<p>2) Upperclasmen have a multitude of options, including:</p>
<p>1) West Campus House System
2) North Campus Program Houses
3) Greek System
4) Collegetown Dorms
5) Co-op system
6) Off-campus housing on North, West, Collegetown or other points afar (Downtown, Sapsucker Woods, Fall Creek)</p>
<p>I think a lot of students will tell you that living off-campus with a group of friends as an upperclassmen is one of the great hallmarks of the Cornell experience.</p>
<p>You also get to deal with some terrible landlords, which is either a gigantic pain in the rear or a learning experience for life after college, depending on how optimistic you are.</p>
<p>^what is it that they do which makes them so terrible?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Like I said, one of the great hallmarks of the Cornell experience.</p>
<p>I only had one bad landlord out of three. He refused to give us back our security deposit even though we had extensive documentation that we left the place in much better condition than what we found it in. We prevailed, however, when we showed up at their office at 7:30 in the morning with pictures.</p>
<p>The other two, Kimball and Novar-Mackesey, were quite good in the scheme of things.</p>