Watch Out for Dorm Life!

Introduction
I’m from Portland, OR. Coming here, I am one of very, very few out of staters. There are a lot of Californians and basically all of my friends are from LA so it’s been a totally new thing for me. It’s taken a lot of adjusting to get used to, but it’s fun.It’s hard because I wanted my college experience to be more like people from all over the country, getting to know all these different types of people, and it really hasn’t been that.

Campus Life and Social Life
Right now, I live in the dorms. I live in Unit 1 in Cheney on the 7th floor which is the all-girls floor and that is quite an experience in itself. I live in a triple. One of the worst mistakes I’ve made. The size is half my room at home. My desk- I share a desk with my roommate. Right above is my bed. The other side of the room is another set of bunk beds for my two other roommates, and I discovered you’re never alone. Sometimes people can really love their roommates. I was somewhat lucky for my floor, my roommates are somewhat cool, but my roommates are kind of quirky. One of them doesn’t throw away a lot of food and it smells bad. Compared to my other friends who have suites in Clark Kerr, they have amazing rooms, I wish I could be there. Triples are not cool especially on the all-girls floor because every other floor is coed. I thought that would be bad because I didn’t want guys in my bathroom, but that would have definitely been worth it, because the girls on the all-girl’s floor are very religious. Most of the time they don’t like to go out, they look down upon me when I come home late at night. When you first fill out your forms, or are doing your applications, you fill out where you would want to live, and I had never done the official tour of Berkeley. There are a few girls that go out, but they’re kind of weird and I don’t really want to go out with them. Academics
I love the campus. I think it’s really pretty all the buildings are really pretty and it’s well maintained. The only bad thing about the campus is that it’s really, really big so sometimes you really have to plan when you’re scheduling your classes, whether or not it’s realistic to get between classes in 10 minutes because that’s how much time you have if you book them one right after the other. Classes start 10 minutes later than the hour. If you have a 10:00 class, it starts at 1:10. So the one thing is that it’s big, but not unmanageable. You do walk a lot more than you would at home, especially people from LA who are really used to cars and driving everywhere. Most people walk. I have one friend who has a bike and it’s never used. Maybe one person uses a bike. It’s not at all like Santa Barbara or anything where people bike all the time, because there are hills so it kind of sucks to ride uphill. Also, I’ve heard a lot of people get their bikes stolen and it’s just not worth it. I have 2 friends on the football team who are big guys, and they have mopeds, and that’s just funny. One of my friends longboards to class and he’s just kind of weird.

Student Body
The food situation is definitely a problem. My mom gives me extra money to go out to eat just because she came and saw what I was eating. Most people gain weight in college but I lost weight in college because the food is not great. I eat in Crossroads, which is the uber-dining hall. People call it the Uber because it’s huge, but the quality of the food is pretty bad. I have not ventured to eat any type of beef there. I had chicken once or twice and that was a bad idea. For the first 2 months I consistently had a stomachache after every meal. There are a lot of little good cafés that I go to, but if you’re worried about your budget and spending money on food, its hard. I would plan to spend and extra couple hundred dollars a month on food. When you’re a freshman, I know you’re required to have a meal plan. How it works is we have a Cal card and you swipe it and it’s an all point-based system- 7 points to eat at the dining hall and you can have unlimited food. A dollar is a point, so if you buy a bag of chips and it’s a dollar, then you use a point.