Dorm Life at Trinity University in San Antonio
68
 | Amazon Price: $4.97 List Price: $22.99 |
 | Amazon Price: $10.00 List Price: $29.95 |
What to Expect
Despite the grumblings you will hear from students who are required to live on campus for their first three years at Trinity, the Trinity dorms have us totally spoiled. Rated by CosmoGirl as the best dorms in the country, and in the Princeton Review as "Dorms Like Palaces" (http://www.princetonreview.com/TrinityUniversity.aspx), these are nice places to stay.
General
To start with, an overall view of the dorms. The First Year Quad (for first years, aka freshmen) is on the east side of campus, an is made up of Winn, Witt, McLean, Beze, Miller, Calvert, and Herndon. Sophomore College is scattered around the west side of campus with the rest of the dorms, and is in Prassel, Thomas, and North. The rest of the student body lives in South, Suzanna, Lightner, Murchison, Isabel, and Myrtle. There are individual floors that serve as community halls, such as the HUMA hall for incoming first years who sign up for the HUMA set of classes, the Swashbucklers (the substance-free hall), the entrepreneurs' hall, the Chinese hall, various music halls, and the like. Each dorm has its own laundry facilities and kitchen, as well as study rooms. The ceilings of the rooms tend to be quite high, which makes for convenient bunking. Included in each room are bunkable twin beds, desks, desk chairs, bedside table-dressers, and a microwave-minifridge combo. The rooms are quite large, and in many dorms include a walk-in closet. All rooms are suite-style, by gender, where one set of roommates shares a bathroom (2 sinks, 1 toilet, 1 shower) with another set of roommates. And finally, all rooms have either a balcony or an outdoor walkway.
RMs, RAs, and Regulations
Resident Mentors and Resident Advisors are non-first years who act as sort of a group leader for the students who live near them. These lucky ducks get their own rooms! Resident Mentors live in the first-year areas, and are responsible for usually around 15-20 students. There will be multiple RM groups on a single hall. They organize activities and generally make sure you integrate into Trinity. Resident Advisors generally are responsible for an entire hall of students, sophomores and up. They are much less involved.
Trinity students are not allowed to have open flames or heat sources in their rooms, so unfortunately no candles, incense, toasters, hot plates, candle warmers, rice cookers, etc. You can have coffee-makers, though, never fear! You can move the furniture around as long as it all stays in the room (lofting, bunking, rearranging, etc.), and you can’t move it out onto the balconies.
A.M. 14 months ago
I am a student at Trinity University who is currently living in the dorms, and I would just like to say that the phrase 'Dorms like Palaces' is a downright lie. First, in this article it says that each dorm has its own laundry room. That is incorrect. The building I'm in shares a tiny laundry room with two other buildings. There's only 5 washers and dryers for 3 dorms' worth of people! The plumbing here is crap. We often go without hot water for several days in a row. Once, all water in the upperclassmen dorms stopped working over the weekend. No toilets, no showers, no sinks, for 3 days. Last year, our suite's shower stopped getting hot water. We called Physical Plant, but they didn't show up for 2 months, and then didn't even fix the problem. We went without hot water for another month before it was fixed. The air conditioning is equally as unreliable, as is the heating. This past winter, the heating stopped working just as an ice storm hit. It was miserable. Currently, the air conditioning isn't working. It's so hot and humid in here that our door has swollen and sticks each time we open or close it. We can't even open the windows to let the breeze in because they've jammed the windows shut. The dorm we're in this year is also infested with roaches, and the bathroom ceiling is covered in mold, which has yet to be fixed despite us calling Physical Plant several times about it. All in all, these dorms are horrible. Students grumble about having to live here for three years because it just plain sucks.