Typical US campus (or college in general) says dormitories, this foreign concept of putting a bunch of strangers in a big house and moreover, to select pair (or triples and quad’s) of those strangers for them to spend the whole year living and sharing their lives, joy’s, sadness’s, sleep’s, laughter’s or music choices in the same room.

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At some point after I made my decision to go to Whitworth I started to wonder why I decided to live through this experience but then I told myself that If every American was able to do it, I would too for only 4 months.

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I don’t know how dorms are organized everywhere else but at Whitworth your dorm is your family, it’s mostly the people you will hang out with or at least that is how I see it, living in Ballard.

Everything is organized so that you can easily be friends with those people: during the first few introduction days, every night, you traditiate with your dorm, which you can learn more about here. Then, when classes start, every day, at 8pm there is a primetime organized in each dorm by the RA’s of the dorm. Primetime is basically any activity we can think of, just to spend some time together and have fun.

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There are also a lot of students with responsibilities in the dorms. Everything is well organized so on each floor there is an RA (a resident assistant) for me it’s Caitlin, which insures that everything is going smoothly on that floor and also, they organize the primetime every night.

Then, for each dorm there’s also a senator, Ballard senator is Katie, the senator is responsible for the whole dorm, she’s the one who lead the discussion when we need to take decisions. Also, the senator is a member of ASWU, the student association of Whitworth, so every dorm as a say on the campus. Then every dorm also has a CDA (Cultural Diversity Advocate) which is responsible for the international students or anything similar.

Then, there’s a CMC (Campus Ministry Coordinator) which is the one responsible for every church related thing. Last, there’s also one graduate adult which lives in a dorm to take care of everything that needs taking care of.

Another random thing about the dorms at Whitworth, the senator (who is part of ASWU) writes a journal about what happened there and also the agenda of the week and some meme’s. This journal is then printed and pasted on every toilet’s door, so everyone can read it.

Now if you want to learn more about my dorm (Ballard) in particular, you can go here...