University of California-Los Angeles Top Questions

Describe the dorms.

Yifang

There are three dorm options offered: residential halls, plazas, and suites. The residential halls are the cheapest. Most rooms are triples (meaning three people live in them), while doubles are less common, and singles are even less common. Of the four residential halls on campus, Dykstra Hall is the oldest and the most social. This is where I lived my freshman year, and I knew all 100 people on my floor, though I wasn't necessarily close to everyone. While Dykstra is generally known as the "freshman hall," it will be undergoing renovation this year (2012), since it hasn't been renovated since the 60s. (I have a friend whose dad went to UCLA and lived in Dykstra. He claims the rooms were doubles during his stay and that the rooms haven't gotten a single coat of paint since then.) The new "freshman hall" is Hedrick Hall, which just reopened this year, after renovations. While I haven't gone inside, I've heard that it's very nice. There are two communal bathrooms on each floor. While the floor is co-ed, the rooms are not. (So if you're a girl, your roommates will also be girls.) Your second option is the plazas. These are similar to the residential halls, but they have their own private bathroom, which get cleaned weekly. While I haven't lived in the plazas myself, I've heard they're less social, which can be good if you want to focus on your studies, but bad if you're a first year and you want to meet people. The third option, the suites, is even more isolated. The two suite complexes on the Hill (what we call the area where all the dorms are) are fairly far away from everything else, including the main campus. These are great places to get your work done, since they're even less social than the plazas, but again, not an ideal place to meet people as a first year. One suite consists of two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom. You can have as many as six people living in one suite (three per bedroom), and like the other dorms, they are single-gender only.

Rebecca

Living at UCLA