I have been promising to do this for some time now, so here it is:
My review of University Plaza.
(intro note)Admittedly I have only myself to blame for panicking when my potential roommate opted not to return to NIU. Had I thought about it rationally I would have simply signed up for another official school dorm or just gotten an apartment by myself.
Services available. So UP offers both a staffed kitchen, as well as internet and a computer lab. The problems with the staffed kitchen and the computer lab are timing. UP caters to both students of NIU and Waubonsee Community College. I can't speak from the experience of the latter, but as to the former… NIU offers classes all day. This can mean quite a varied schedule for the average student. However rather than hire a couple extra people to keep the things open for those people who happen to have time to kill between the hours of 10-11am or 1-4pm (or in the case of the lab 11-5pm) they are closed. This leaves any students with restrictive schedules to have to go spend additional money on food elsewhere or compete with some class that is using the only public computer labs in the english departments because the school doesn't care enough about it's English department to give the computer-based classes their own labs. The need for such access to the dorm's lab is paramount when one does not own a printer or doesn't feel like dealing with their standard 64k dialup wifi. It could be argued that I should just stop whining and shell out the extra cash to pay for a printer or better internet. However as someone who is in school by the grace of the state and the funding it provided, I don't really need to be spending any more money. Another fun little tidbit is that despite the fact that the building has only 9 floors (counting the ground floor as '1' and not '0'). Yet the only stairs that I could find were for emergency use or staff use only. As a fat kid who doesn't want to be as such, I would have liked the option to take the stairs rather than the elevator. The condition of my room wasn't spectacular either. When I returned from Winter Break it looked as though the wand for the blinds had been ripped out of the contraption itself, a condition which was not present when I had left the month before. I also noticed over the course of the spring semester that a hole had developed in the ceiling. Apparently the window was pulling away from the ceiling. The heating/cooling unit was also a treat. Due to the setup of the system it could only ever pump out freezing cold air or smouldering hot air, with the control never actually in my hands. So on those warm winter days it would be sweltering and on the cool fall/spring days it would be freezing. I like using blankets and walking around in my shorts as much as the next oddball, but I like to have the choice. The last major bitching point has to do with the purpose of the RA's. In a situation like that, unless I really bond with the people (something that is more rare than I realized), I mostly keep to myself. It wouldn't have been so bad were it not for the mandatory meetings. I should not be fined for having better things to do with my time than sit around with a group of kids 6-7 years younger than me and be treated like I am away at summer camp.
On the plus side it was only a 7 minute walk to my classes.
Final verdict: Not for me. …then again I am a miserly old kook.
update: I guess they decided to keep 8 dollars from my security deposit because their building is falling apart. I didn't throw parties… I didn't wave around large unwieldy implements of destruction… I did not cause any amount of damage to the room. Logically I should have gotten the whole deposit back.
