Dorm room
Each pair of Missouri Academy students is given a room inside the four-story residential hall Cooper Hall. The room's dimensions are listed as (fill this in) x (fill this in), but they vary to a sufficient degree that you shouldn't build anything according to those specifications. It is recommend that you call the Academy office and request dimensions for a specific room rather than "guesstimating."
What you get
Every room comes equipped, by default, with the following items:
- Two beds with a loft
- Two desks with chairs
- A two drawer pedestal that has a locking drawer (keys available at the RLO for checkout)
- A closet and dresser
- Two Ethernet ports and hub
- A port for a cable television hookup
- Walls between rooms are magnetic, which allows for easy hanging of posters, etc.
And that's pretty much it. Somehow, though, these few items manage to take up much of the available floor space. To rectify this, students can loft their beds, which is essentially a bunk bed with no bottom bunk. They can go as high as almost touching the ceiling, or on the floor. It is also possible to bunk the beds in the room with the lofts provided. Using the cleared space, you might set up a desk, some foof chairs, a couch, bookshelf, etc. The beds used to not be lofted, and you had to buy your own. Some students would sell their lofts for prices as little as a garden gnome
What you should bring
Most people would agree that the following things are necessary:
- A mini-refrigerator - Unless you plan on eating in the Union all of the time, this is essential. And you can't go to the Union at 1:00 AM, or during study hours. The Station, an on-campus convenience store which allows purchases with Aladine, sells many take-home food items that must be refrigerated to be safely eaten. Also consider the problems of storing milk for cereal and chilling sodas (though during the winter the space between the window and screen can produce very frosty drinks).
- A printer - Printing to the school printers costs $0.10 per page, which can become expensive when you're printing multiple drafts of a paper or printing smaller assignments frequently.
- Ethernet cable - If you plan on bringing your own computer and want to connect to the network, bring some cat5.
- Editors Note: Northwest provides the Laptop for student use and they give an ethernet cable to the student.
- A fan - It's uncomfortably hot in the rooms August-October and May, as they lack air conditioning. Fans don't solve the problem completely, but they helped me (Mpnolan) at least fall asleep.
- Editors Note: There is a small AC unit in each room, but a fan would be a huge help to the temperature of the room.
Issues
Roommates
Some students find being around another person all of the time very hard to adjust to. The Academy tries to help this problem by giving each student a short interests survey when signing up to make matches more bearable. But even if you admire your roommate, being around them all of the time can be frustrating.
One thing to do is to plan your class schedules so that, as often as possible, when one person is in class the other is out. This should give 3-4 hours of solo time per day. There are also quiet places in Ownes Library and the second and third floors of the Union.
Noise
The room's walls are practically paper-thin and if someone is talking in the next room, you'll hear it.
If you end up next to a chaotic sleeper who tosses and turns in the night, the wall will suddenly bulge out at you late at night and probably startle you.
