"Good luck surviving seasonal depression or maintaining your slowly failing eyesight, especially during a pandemic and you should not be spending long periods in common spaces, when 95% of the rooms in Munger have NO WINDOW"
"It can be a huge problem for people to live in because normally people would feel very uncomfortable living in a room without windows, and you don't even have a safe place to recover yourself when you feel down."
"Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal and living with 5-6 other grad students may not be your ideal option (weigh this heavily). I happened to luck out with 6 complete strangers"
"The apartments have 6-7 bedrooms (and each has it's own bathroom) which is great when you want to socialize but also a challenge if you need quiet."
And of course, there's real selection bias here. These are grad students, and grad students in Ann Arbor have a fair bit of choice. Any problems at UCSB will be magnified, as it's an undergrad dorm where the students have less life experience and less choice.
What I'd really love to see is a study on the mental health of people moving into this. People generally have a very poor understanding of how lighting affects mental health. I know I did until I took it seriously.
>Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal
This is going to be a bigger issue than you might think at first. No windows means that if you're too hot you can't open the window to let in cool and fresh air. You're stuck with whatever the building decides on.
> This is going to be a bigger issue than you might think at first. No windows means that if you're too hot you can't open the window to let in cool and fresh air.
Not being able to vent their living space is a major red flag.
Looks like that's actually been accounted for directly:
"[The building] will provide built-in social distancing as required by COVID. Fresh air, the architect insisted, will be vented into all rooms at twice the rate mandated by existing building codes and will be off-gassed directly to the atmosphere without any transfer to other rooms in the dorm."
Reading the comments feels like everyone went to college in bizarro world. The dorms I lived in always had shared bedrooms. In one 4 people across two bunk beds. Having a room to call my own in a dorm would have been an extraordinary improvement. Wouldn't have cared in the slightest bit about a window.
What I can't get from this article is price. When I was student, reason why students shared those rooms with bunk beds was mainly because that was the thing they(or rather their parents) could afford and renting proper flat was out of their capabilities.
Nowadays, in the city I live in 20min distance from university my rent for flat might be cheaper than what students are paying for their dorm room(with windows).
Somehow I have a feeling, that prices for these dorms are adjusted to property rental prices(and income from renting square meter here is larger, than what you might get from flat) and those who have friends might share some place and rent together to have place with more breathing room...
PS If there are no windows - why it had to be built as tall building and not some underground hole, from where those students - lesser humans can crawl out for the time to study...
Isla Vista is the closest community to UCSB, and the students get packed into the private housing there as well (monthly cost of renting a house is about $1200 per bedroom, and you often have to sign a lease for 12 months even if you'll only be there for 9).
Nobody said anything about not wanting windows. It's the choice between a window and sharing a single room with 4 people. No window is the easy choice.
For you, perhaps. And maybe I would have said the same thing in college, when I paid approximately zero attention to my health. But I learned in the years since that light levels make a huge difference. A room like that could easily have pushed me into severe "seasonal" depression.
Exactly. These days, I know that the pain of 3 obnoxious "same-room" roommates may still be worth the price vs sunlight, which will dramatically affect my overall mood. I can easily complain about the roommates, but the light will have a greater real effect on my mood.
I wouldn't say the housing market in Ann Arbor has a fair bit of choice. The vast majority of undergrads live in frat style 7+ bedroom houses. There really aren't a huge number of 1 or even 2 bedroom apartments available, and what does exist is either incredibly run down or 2k+ a month in a high rise building that grad students can't afford.
North campus has better 1/2 bed options, but only engineering and art students would be there.
It's super frustrating when people take a phrase, change its meaning by removing it from context, and then nitpick it.
That the choices are ones you don't like doesn't mean they aren't choices. The people who live in Munger all did so voluntarily, meaning that they're going to be the people who were most likely to be ok with Munger's limitations.
Is your claim based on the assumption that it has to be within walking distance of campus? It's been awhile since I lived in the area, but I never had issues finding a reasonable student apartment if you were willing to bus/bike/commute in
I've met several MBA's, and they are more 'partially literate' in that they can write huge quantities of stuff, but each paragraph has nothing to do with the last paragraph.
Similarly, they can read whole books very quickly, but they do so by reading just the first sentence on every page. This is what gives them the superpower of reading large technical emails, and responding to them in seconds about a completely unrelated topic.
The most highly educated person in my extended family has the worst spelling and grammar of anyone I've ever seen. Getting a hand written note from them is always a guessing game.
God, this annoys the crap out of me. People say I write novels in my emails, so I tried breaking things up once for an MBA. It resulted in a dozen or so emails that when concatenated would equal the "novel" they'd have originally complained about.
Lesson learned: MBA's seem to value incomplete communication, and email headers over a condensed explanation of what's actually relevant.
My goal wasn't to represent the link. People can click on the link, and the person I replied to already said it had great reviews. My goal was to pull out quotes I thought interesting.
They claim to address health effects of light with dynamic "virtual windows." I agree it would be useful to study how well this works. If nothing else, it would inform how we design long haul spacecraft eventually...
“All virtual windows will have a fully programmed circadian rhythm control system to substantially reflect the lighting levels and color temperature of natural daylight,” according to the statement. All common areas, the statement added, “have significant access to natural light.”
"Good luck surviving seasonal depression or maintaining your slowly failing eyesight, especially during a pandemic and you should not be spending long periods in common spaces, when 95% of the rooms in Munger have NO WINDOW"
"It can be a huge problem for people to live in because normally people would feel very uncomfortable living in a room without windows, and you don't even have a safe place to recover yourself when you feel down."
"Having building controlled heat/cooling is definitely not ideal and living with 5-6 other grad students may not be your ideal option (weigh this heavily). I happened to luck out with 6 complete strangers"
"The apartments have 6-7 bedrooms (and each has it's own bathroom) which is great when you want to socialize but also a challenge if you need quiet."
And of course, there's real selection bias here. These are grad students, and grad students in Ann Arbor have a fair bit of choice. Any problems at UCSB will be magnified, as it's an undergrad dorm where the students have less life experience and less choice.
What I'd really love to see is a study on the mental health of people moving into this. People generally have a very poor understanding of how lighting affects mental health. I know I did until I took it seriously.