Dorm review: East Neighborhood: Holmes Hall

Hello!

This is another post in a series that I'm trying to do on the dorms of Michigan State University. Today, I'm working on reviewing the last residence hall in East Neighborhood, Holmes Hall. I also did a review on Hubbard and Akers.

I did not live in Holmes, but I spent a LOT of time there first semester as one of my close friends lived there. Holmes Hall is known as the home of Lyman Briggs College, which is a residential college focusing on science and math majors. Usually, you have to be accepted into Lyman Briggs College to live there, although my friend was only there because her roommate was an LB student.

And actually, this dorm post will have no pictures. The dorm is set up the EXACT same way as Hubbard Hall, so if you want to see what it will look like, take a look at the Hubbard post. Everything is the same, the beds, the closet and shelf, the dresser, the mirror, the desks, the modular shelves. This will mostly be a review on Holmes Hall itself.

I disliked Holmes Hall the most out of any of the dorms that I visited. It had an odd smell in it (although I suppose if you're a Lyman Briggs student, you're used to it. And it's probably because of dissections and chemistry and stuff, but still). I hated the dining hall. It was where I had my racist experience. It was far away from Hubbard (okay, not really, but it was far enough away that I complained like crazy for having to walk over to visit my friend).

The dorms: Like I said, they are exactly like the Hubbard dorms. There's six floors. My friend lived on the sixth floor, which was supposedly haunted (although I never met anyone/thing coming down at 3AM).

The dining hall: I wasn't very fond of it (to put it mildly). They are the only dining hall in East Neighborhood to serve late night (which means they're open until midnight). They have Today's Features, which has different foods each day; Levels, which has pizza (usually cheese, pepperoni, and then a special one) and made-to-order sandwiches (those are to die for. That is the only reason that I ever agreed to eat at Holmes); Origins, which has made-to-order waffles and omelets in the morning, and vegetarian stir fry at lunch and night; Mosaic, which has smoothies and parfaits and Halal entrees.

The rest of it: Since Holmes Hall is home to Lyman Briggs, there are a lot of classrooms in it. It also has a Sparty's Express, which is a much, much smaller version of the Sparty's in Hubbard and doesn't have a grill or fryer--it's more like a convenience store, so you can still get your Combo-X-Change there.

They have two study lounges, which are actually pretty nice. The study lounges are very comfortable and I did spend quite a bit of time in them.

Overall, chances are that if you're in Holmes, you're a Lyman Briggs student so none of my issues with the dorm will bother you. Otherwise, if you're trying to switch dorms, I would stay away from Holmes.

Go green!
Rakuzen

Dorm Review: East Neighborhood: Akers Hall

Hello!

This is part of a series that I've begun, since I know that a lot of people are starting to figure out their dorm assignments and want to take a look at what their dorm looks like. (I know that the official assignments aren't out yet, because they come out in August. But like I mentioned in my Hubbard Hall review, if you check StuInfo, then they'll have posted a room to your account. They say that this is not the official room (and a lot of people that I know had their rooms changed) because it's for billing purposes, but it's always nice to check and get a little bit excited. My assignment was right, but I did end up switching out.) I will only be doing a few of the dorms, the ones that I have personal experience, but if you want to request your dorm, leave a comment and I'll find some friends who lived there. I will probably do East Neighborhood (Akers, Holmes, Hubbard), South Neighborhood (Case, Wonders, Holden, Wilson), River Trail Neighborhood (Owen, McDonel, VanHoosen), and Yakeley.

Note, I did not personally live here. I was assigned to this dorm, but I ended up switching out. However, one of my friends lived here and I visited the room often, so I can give a little bit of insight but not a lot of pictures.

Akers is special, because it is the only suite-style dorm on campus. Four people live in the room, the bathroom is inside the dorm (as opposed to sharing with another room like in Hubbard, or a community bathroom), and there is a tiny "living room" in the dorm.

The first picture that I have of Akers is from the LiveOn site. When I was first searching my dorm last summer, I found this picture, but I can't seem to find it on the site. This is just a floor plan that shows you, basically, what it looks like. There's two "bedrooms," that have two beds and a dresser in each, with a mirror. In the floor plan, the beds are lofted, so there's more space. My friend had his beds end-to-end, so it was kind of cramped. The desks can move around, too, so they had their desks in the bedroom which meant they had to jump on the beds to get around. 

It has four "closet" style areas, which you can see in the picture is across from the bedrooms. The closet areas have a pole and a shelf above it, which actually provides a lot of space. 

MSU has virtual tours on the bedroom, bathroom, and living room of Akers now, so I won't bore you with the details of the room. If you click the link, you can go through a virtual tour and see how other people set it up. Although, as I look at the virtual tour, make sure that you notice the yellow wall that divides the two bedrooms. At first glance, it might look like it's not there and that the room is huge, but the wall is there. 

Now that there's some pictures, I'll do a review on the rest of Akers. Akers was, apparently, remodeled. The inside is super nice. Both East and West Akers have a study lounge area with tables and chairs that is really nice and comfortable. The walls are gorgeous on the first floor. There are classrooms and there's a full computer lab, which is nice. 

I spent a lot of time in that cafeteria, because the food is decent--better than Akers, but not as good as some of the other dorms. It has three stations; Bamboo, which serves "Asian" food like sushi and a made to order wok meal of the day (as in, Ramen one day, Moo Shu Pork another, etc.), Publisher, which serves sandwiches and wings, and Today's Features, which is just a hot line with different food every day. It has two lines of salad bars, and a dessert area. Akers dining hall is beautiful because it has windows along half of one of the walls, where you can look out at people walking to class and the beautiful grass and trees. 

Overall, Akers is decent. I didn't want to live in a suite-style room though, so I didn't live there. The dining hall is pretty okay sometimes (I know, high praise). The study rooms are nice, as is the study lounge. 

Hope this helped. If I scrounge up any pictures from my friends' experience, I'll be sure to update the post! 

Go green! 

Rakuzen

Dorm review: East Neighborhood: North Hubbard Hall

Hello! 

I know it's been awhile, but I just wanted to get this review up! You might have seen one like this before on the blog without pictures, because I had it scheduled and didn't get it together enough to post the pictures before it went up. So, last night when I had insomnia, I re-wrote the post and got the pictures together.

This is a post in (another) series that I'm starting, about the dorms on campus. I won't be doing every single dorm unless requested (through the comments or through an email), but I will try to post an in-depth review with pictures (if I have them) and a review on the entire dorm. I'll start with Hubbard Hall. I believe it's the same in North and South, but I lived in North Hubbard on the first floor. 

If you check your StuInfo account, you might see your room assignment! I had AOP on this day last year, and they posted the room assignments. Now, the housing department will say that it's not set in stone and it's used for billing purposes, but for me it was my first room assignment. So who knows, you might find your roommate based off this assignment and keep them or not. (For me, I received the right assignment. But I did end up switching to North Hubbard, so I'll do another post on that in case someone else is like me and wants to switch buildings/roommates).

These are pictures that I took when I first moved into the dorm. Because my roommate was an international student, she moved in before me and her stuff was in the room, so I couldn't take pictures of the whole room. Also, I took them with my iPod, so the quality's not the best, but beggars can't be choosers.

First, I guess we'll start with the end of my room. There was this huge window. I am horrible at taking pictures, but you should be able to see that the window is huge. It has blinds covering it. There's a window sill in front that is also really wide, big enough to sit on! (although 1, we kept stuff on the window sill so it was too cluttered and 2, if you sit on it, be careful not to fall out of the window).

In front of the window (and to the left a little) was my desk! My desk was very pretty, kind of wide. It had a pull out shelf under it. The picture's a little wonky, but that's to show depth (and also because, actually, this picture I snapped off of a video that I took on move-in day. I won't post the video because it was horrible, but I did capture some good shots from it when I went over it last night). There was a cover for the shelf that slid out, which is the black thing you see between the desk and the shelf.

My chair. A simple black rolling chair with arm rests. It wasn't bad, just not super comfy since it's plastic.

On top of my desk, attached to the wall, was a humongous tack board. Gorgeous! For the first week, it was ultra bare, but I bought a ton of costume jewelry for cheap from the mall and hung it up, and then I started putting random flyers up. I wanted to post my pictures in a bare room but sadly, that didn't quite work out. The tack board has about another inch on the left that I cut off on accident, but that's about the size. The flowers were a gift from my roommate, since she went on a trip just before I moved in and I didn't meet her until a few days later. 

Next is my bed. I took a couple of different shots for you. The right one is how it looked shortly after I moved in, when my cousin lofted it for me. The angle is a little funny to show you the steps on the side, and the left picture is just the side bar that keeps you from crashing and dying. As for the towels and random stuff laying on the side, that is because those steps HURT. That's why I ultimately unlofted my bed. You can kind of see in the first picture, my refrigerator under the bed. Lofted, I would say that the bed is about 6-7'. Unlofted (which I have on my phone, I'll have to update) is about 4'. 

Moving on, there's a bathroom (which I didn't get a picture of), and then the little entrance way to the dorm. This is a mirror over the dresser. I'm 5'1" and I could barely see it (I'm on my tip toes), my roommate had a mirror that she had on the dresser that we mostly used. A coffeemaker on the left, which I mentioned in my Dorm items: Food/kitchen post. You can barely see it, but there's a plastic "go green" bottle that they give to all residents.

The dresser. I didn't have that many clothes, and neither did my roommate, so we put mostly food and personal stuff in there. As you can see, the drawers were kind of deep. Since the top drawer didn't open all the way, we stuck tea and hair supplies (hair dryer, straightener, etc.) in there. The top was kind of a mess, because we stored our makeup up there. 

Directly across from the mirror and dressers is the closet space. The closet has a pole and two hooks on the far left side. I couldn't take a picture of the entire closet, because my roommate had already moved in. As you can see, there's a little shelf on top of the closet. It was pretty tall, because I could fit my box from the dresser there for the entire semester. 

On top of that was this huge open space. It had sliding doors, but it was too high for both my roommate and I to reach (it reached to the top of the ceiling). She ended up storing her suitcases there.

That's it! I stole a picture from my roommate so you can kind of see the room. Also, under her bed, you can see the other storage units that we had. These were modular, meaning we could take them apart and re-arrange them however we wanted. There's two shelves and a drawer on the bottom. I took one of the shelves and put it under my bed because even when it was unlofted, it was too high for me to just jump onto. For the other shelf and the drawer, I left them under her bed and just used them to store knickknacks. Along the far wall, you can see half of the window and her desk and chair. The grey thing along the wall is the heater. 

There is the room review. I really did like it, except for the fact that they didn't really use the heater in winter (it was so cold in there, which may or may not have been mostly because we were on the first floor), and then seemed to crank it up as it got closer to spring, so the room was roasting. 

The dining hall: Hubbard's dining hall is not TOO bad. It has three stations, Piazza, which serves made-to-order omelets for breakfast and made-to-order pasta for lunch and dinner; Terra Salsa Verde, which served Tex-Mex style food like nachos, quesadillas and tacos; and Today's Features, which had various food every day. It also has two rows of salad bar. The food wasn't too bad, but it wasn't as good as some of the other dorms on campus. The dining hall itself is very, very dark because of the blinds that they have on the windows. 

The rest of it: Hubbard is home to the East Neighborhood engagement center. At the engagement center, you can see UUD advisors, and I think they have tutoring and computer services there. They also have a writing center there, where you can set up an appointment to get help with writing papers. There is a fabulous Sparty's in Hubbard, which has a grill and fryer, so you can order hot meals like hamburgers and fries or chicken tenders as part of your Combo-X-Change. The Olin Neighborhood Clinic is located in South Hubbard, and I went there twice during the year (you get three free visits as a student). It's super convenient, and they're really helpful and can write prescriptions. There are classrooms in the basement, and there's a small computer lab (8 computers and a printer) in North Hubbard. I believe that Hubbard was recently remodeled, because they have a lounge area near the computer lab that has comfortable couches and televisions. 

Overall, I loved Hubbard. It is the farthest from the East Campus bus stop, but the walk to it (not that far, really) is just beautiful. I had a pretty good experience at Hubbard, and I would honestly recommend it. 

I hope this helped you if you got assigned here! 

Go green!
Rakuzen