@sakashima3 Hey! Thanks @SJ2727 for paging me. 
My daughter is currently a freshman at GT, and I can tell you about her experience with housing, food and band.
It is possible to live in a suite-style dorm freshman year, but your time ticket to choose housing is based on totally random draw, so it’s possible the dorm style you want will be gone before your turn to choose. Also, I think all the suite-style dorms are on West campus. That’s totally fine for some kids (including mine) – but it’s far from the stadium, frat row and most of the parties. It’s the quieter side of campus.
So what my kid did to ensure good housing was apply to the honors program, which isn’t really an honors college like at other schools – it’s more a living-learning community. It requires a couple of essays, but if you get in, you have to live in honors housing, where you get your own room and only share a bathroom with one other person. There are some other benefits/drawbacks, but my kid only heard “private room” and she was sold. So far, it has been a GREAT experience for her. I can share much more info about it if it becomes relevant.
There are three main dining halls, plus a bunch of food in the student center (Panda Express, Chick-fil-A, lots of things). The dining hall food is…fine. Not great. I hear some complaints on the parent forum that it’s actively horrible, but my own kid doesn’t think so. It’s nothing to write home about, however.
She’s in marching band this semester, which is a class that meets and rehearses on MWF afternoons from 3:30 to 5:30. And then most of Saturday if the team is playing at home, of course. There are 300 or so members in the band? Lots of trumpets. She’s a clarinet, and I think there are 27 of them. GT does not march at a high level the way you see at Auburn or Ohio State or whatever, but they still do reasonable drill plus a ton of fun activities. She is having a great time with it.
In the spring, you can register for Pep Band as a class in the same way, which only meets on Monday evenings I think. But she is leaning more toward one of the ensembles – there are concert and symphonic bands, and concert and symphonic orchestras. Unfortunately, her skills are probably best suited to concert band, but the meeting time (2 to 3:15 T-TH) conflicts with a class she needs for her major. So she’s debating whether she wants to audition for the higher-level symphonic band, try to get a spot in concert orchestra (they rarely have woodwind spots available in the spring because most people audition in the fall and stay all year, and she did marching band instead) – or just do pep band even though she’s not super interested, or skip it altogether and resolve to practice on her own.
There are also jazz ensembles and rock ensembles and other things – more suited for trumpet than clarinet.
I am not super familiar with the project teams yet, but I know there are a ton of opportunities with varying degrees of difficulty to join.
There are all kinds of students at GT, from really nerdy to frat bros and everything in-between. My daughter is an artsy design kid who couldn’t play a sport if her life depended on it, hates the idea of Greek life, loves thrifting for clothes and experimenting with her hair and makeup – but also just competed in a Mario Kart tournament on campus against a bunch of dudes and did pretty well. She goes to parties but isn’t a big drinker, and she has not felt pressured to do anything she hasn’t wanted to. Marching band has been great in terms of feeling nurtured, because the older kids look out for the younger ones and make sure they’re safe. That said, her main friend group so far has been through the honors program and not marching band (which surprised us).
I can’t speak to the weather because we’re local to Atlanta, so she’s used to it. The summer and early fall is hot as hell, and she nearly passed out marching in the heat at the first game. (There is ice cold a/c inside everywhere, including every dorm.) Winters are mostly mild. If it snows (like every other year), the whole campus will probably shut down, lol.
Let me know if you have any other specific questions, and I’ll try to answer them!
Incidentally, my GT kid considered both CMU and Cornell – she was looking for a niche arts+tech major that both of these schools offered. She eventually decided not to apply to either for a bunch of reasons – weather, grind, marching band, and cost all figured in.
(I wanted to jump on the bandwagon of cautioning you against ED if you’re not 100% sure of your top choice. My older daughter applied to quite a few selective schools – Emory, WashU, Northwestern, Rice – but she only applied RD or EA if it was available because she wasn’t willing to commit. It worked out fine, and she got into two of her top choices through regular decision. The most painful part was waiting until late March to find out.)