It's October. Some of you high schoolers who applied to IU have gotten your acceptance letters. That's great! Maybe you decided IU is the school for you, and that's even better! Now you only have few short months to figure out where you want to live, and I know from experience that can be crazy stressful. I was lucky to find a living-learning center that suited my interests, and you should definitely check it out as well.
I live in the INSPIRE LLC, which is specifically for education majors. Since I plan to teach high school English, I knew INSPIRE would be the perfect fit for me, but I had no idea I would love it as much as I do. There are so many wonderful people here who have the same passion for teaching as I do, and we all clicked after just a few days. Although INSPIRE is designed for education majors in mind, you don't have to be an education major. We have biology majors, premed majors, and even a couple of Kelley students on our floor. I was a little worried that I would never meet anyone that isn't an education major, but even on my education floor, we have our fair share of non-education majors. This year is also the first year of INSPIRE, so we're the kind of the guinea pigs for our directors. They're using us to figure out what they want to do in the future, but we don't mind. It just means we get to do all of the fun stuff first!
INSPIRE members are required to take a one credit hour course, but it's actually really fun. We have guest speakers most weeks, and even the Indiana Teacher of the Year came to talk to us about his methods of teaching. We are also doing a year-long project with members of the faculty in the School of Education to help us explore more about teaching and learning. My favorite part about INSPIRE is that we are doing service learning for it as well. Most education majors don't get to work in a classroom until their sophomore or junior year, but I get to my first semester of college! I love getting all of this experience so early on.
Now, onto what may be a deciding factor for some of you: location. INSPIRE is located on the first floor of Rose Avenue Residence Hall.
Let me tell you all the reason why Rose is great.Rose is brand new.
This is only the second year it's been open, and it is absolutely gorgeous.There is so much space to just chill.
The first floor has 3 lounges, while all of the others have 2 lounges.There's a kitchenette.
It is actually about the size of my kitchen at home.It's in Southeast Neighborhood.
Which some people may tell you is far away from everything and it's such a nightmare to get to class, blah blah blah. Don't listen to those people! Southeast is not really that much farther from the academic area of campus than Central. It's only about a ten minute walk to Ballantine, even with all of the construction that's going on right now. Southeast is also an extremely beautiful part of campus, and you can even walk to the College Mall, which would be lot harder to do from any other neighborhood.We have Cool Beans.
Which is a small coffee shop inside the lobby. It's great to grab a quick bite.The Restaurants at Woodland are right across the street in Forest.
It's the best dining hall on campus, no question.We have a Music, Movies, and More inside Rose.
I have spent many a night with my floor mates having movie marathons in our lounge.There's a fitness room with treadmills, an elliptical, a bike, and a rowing machine.
I'll admit I haven't spent too much time in there, but it's super convenient to have a fitness room in your dorm instead of having to trudge all the way to the SRSC.
I wasn't really planning on that list being so long, but there are so many great things about Rose! To be honest, I would have applied for INSPIRE regardless of which dorm it was in, but it was definitely a perk to have it be in the nicest dorm on campus!
Again, I really encourage you to look into the INSPIRE LLC. I'll link the website here, and here is a video from the official launch of INSPIRE! It's long, but really informative on what we're all about here.
Here are some more great articles about choosing which dorm you want to live in, with some other points of view about INSPIRE and Rose!