Didn't do college, but did live in military barracks for several years. Some open bay, some 3 or 4 man rooms, some single rooms.

The. Worst. was when I transferred from Japan to Maine. I'd lived in a single room in Japan and was an E4 with 6 years in (yeah, I know...) and they put me in a room with 5 other sailors, all below E3 or below, all of whom were non-rates (mess cooks and such) at their first duty station out of boot camp.

One kid just plain reeked. His name was Gagne, universally known as GagMe. I lasted two days before I told Housing that they either moved me or I was going to arrange a GI shower for that scumbag. I got told "Sucks to be you."

I wasn't eligible for housing allowance or COMRATS (commuted rations) since I was a single E4, but by this point I didn't give a rat's ass. I found an off-base shared rental with some other single guys and moved the hell out on my own dime.

There were some epic parties, but that's a story for another day...

Fall of 78 for reference. My roommate was fine. The room next to us, not so much. First or second night campus police are called by one of them. He tells them, you are taking one of us to jail/in otherwise I'm going to kill that crazy bastard. He ended up leaving with them leaving crazy guy on our floor.
24/7 playing of Barry Manilow records. He was on the phone constantly (cord out in the hall) with Barry's daughter Tracy or Barry himself as they were good friends. (spoiler alert Barry doesn't have a daughter). Dude looked like a wimpy Woody Allen. Dude ended up with the room to his self for the entire semester and we never saw him again after that. I've always wondered what ever happened to him.
He was supposedly from New York, but this was Southern Illinois Carbondale so that seemed like an odd choice of schools for him.
His name is very generic so Google Foo doesn't help at all to solve the mystery of his current status.

Why kids choose particular schools is interesting as well. I have no idea why my son’s roommate picked USF.

On the other hand, I drove up with my son on Monday for his orientation, they had things for parents to do as well. We met up for lunch and sat with some other new students. One was from PA and the other from CT, so I asked why they chose USF. A lot of the reasons were the same as my son’s reasons for picking USF over UF and FSU. The girl’s main reason was a good one though. She’s a National Merit Scholar Finalist and USF gives a full-ride scholarship to out of state NMSFs. She said she couldn’t afford in-state tuition at Penn State without student loans.

It was reassuring that every kid we talked to had solid reasons for being there.

Trapper189:My daughter was one of 10 kids in her middle school to get all A’s in every class all 3 years. She just started high school and is all on board with getting a Florida bright future scholarship, where they take certain core classes and have to maintain a 3.5 grade avg. then the state pays for a large bulk of their tuition at any state university. Did your son or any of his peers qualify for that ?

quote:

Originally posted by PHPaul:

single room in Japan and was an E4

Your navy was very different from mine. I was E5 and shared a bedroom with 85 other guys -- NAS Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico.

Freshman roommate was Larry the farmer from "up around Saginaw," nice guy but very very unsophisticated with several annoying habits. We had very little in common, neither in background or interests. I don't think he even knew the facts of life, and his speculations on the nature of the fairer sex were quite amusing. I never saw him explore a relationship or date anyone the whole time I knew him. I was as girl-crazy as most guys that age, and the girls in Ann Arbor in the Fall after the "Summer of Love" were quite compliant.

He did claim to have a girlfriend at home. He'd go home pretty much every weekend, His absence on weekends was very convenient for my explorations in that area. His biggest annoyance was that when he'd come back to school on Mondays he smelled to high heaven of manure. Of course, this led to rampant speculation as to exactly what species his "girlfriend" was. He was too shy to use the communal showers when anyone else was in there, sometimes we had to put up with the stink for the entire week.

I got through a single trimester with him before switching dorms and roommates. Michael was much more compatible, and we are still close friends to this day.

quote:

Originally posted by ElToro:
Trapper189:My daughter was one of 10 kids in her middle school to get all A’s in every class all 3 years. She just started high school and is all on board with getting a Florida bright future scholarship, where they take certain core classes and have to maintain a 3.5 grade avg. then the state pays for a large bulk of their tuition at any state university. Did your son or any of his peers qualify for that ?

You bet he did! And got a merit scholarship from USF as well. Every in-state kid we talked to was getting Bright Futures and I’m sure all of his friends did to.

It’s a little skewed to look at his high school as far as Bright Futures because they kick you out if you don’t maintain at least a 3.0 weighted GPA. That’s not hard to do though since all the core classes are honors and the students take nothing but college classes their junior and senior years.

The hardest part about Bright Futures is the SAT/ACT/CLT scores. There’s even ways around that. The volunteer student that gave us a hand moving in said by getting her AICE diploma she didn’t need the test scores. My kids’ school doesn’t offer those classes, so I’m not super familiar with them, but I think you need certain grades in only 7 AICE classes to get the diploma if you kid’s school offers them.

The community service hours are fairly easy. At the end of her sophomore year, my daughter had 75. I think FLDOE now accepts work hours as community service hours as well.

For those that don’t know, here’s the basics for Florida’s Bright Futures Scholarship paid for by the Florida Lottery:

First, any Florida resident student can qualify for it regardless of need.

There two levels, what used to be called 100% and what used to be called 75%. The 100% is not quite 100% at some of the schools. It pays for tuition at any public university or college in Florida or reimburses tuition up to the public university rate at any private university or college in Florida.

The basic requirements:

100%:
Weighted GPA 3.5 or better
100 or more hours of community service
1340 or better on SAT. I don’t know the qualifying ACT or CLT scores off the top of my head.

75%:
Weighted GPA 3.0 or better
75 or more community service hours
1210 or 1220 SAT? Again, don’t know the others.

Weighted GPA was new to me. You get extra points for the level of the class, extra .5 for honors and extra 1.0 for college level. In other words, an A in an honors class is 4.5 on a 4.0 scale while an A in a college level class is a 5.0 on a 4.0 scale.

On another note, really cool for those with a 529 investment plan:

Scholarships don’t count against you when you take money out for education expenses. For example, let’s say a year of college is $25k and the student gets a $10k scholarship. You can take $25k out of the 529 plan tax and penalty free and the student can keep the $10k.

A couple more tips from having been through the process:

Apply for housing as soon as possible. I’m serious, don’t wait to figure out which school your kid is going to first. The housing application fee is minimal and at many schools applying reserves your place in line to pick your dorm and room. For example, you can apply for housing at UF when you’ve applied to the school and before you’ve even been accepted; the fee is $25. Every school is different though. USF requires that you’ve been accepted and have registered for orientation but you don’t need to have paid the $200 admissions fee, kit the $50 housing application fee.

Last tip, stay on top of the admissions documents required. We sent every thing as soon as we could and everything got screwed up by something beyond our control, but required our efforts to correct. USF screwed up his social security number and residency. His high school screwed up his high school transcripts, his two year college screwed up the automatic process that was supposed to award him his AA degree, College Board screwed up his SAT scores. The first call for every single one of these issues resulted in someone accusing my son of not having done something he was supposed to do or him doing something incorrectly. At least three calls needed to be made in each case before we got ahold of someone who took ownership of the problem and fixed it. In every case, we did what we did it right in the first place.

As an example:

We sent his college transcript from his two year school to USF in early May as soon as it was available. Since then, USF shows that it has been received and is “under review” two days after we sent it. My son called USF in June and asked if there was a reason it was still “under review”. He was told they received 10,000 transcripts and it takes time to process. Same exact thing in July. Beginning of August, I call. I’m told his college transcript doesn’t show he earned the AA degree.

He calls the registrars office at the two year school and gets told he didn’t earn the AA degree and needs to talk to his advisor. The advisor says he met all the requirements and doesn’t understand what happened. Back to the registrars office and the said he didn’t apply for graduation and it’s his fault, but they will fix it. We are a week later and it’s not fixed. From the school’s website:

“Graduation at Florida SouthWestern State College is an automatic process. Once a student has met all the necessary requirements for their declared degree program, the student’s degree will automatically be awarded, and the student’s official transcript will be updated. The student will be notified of their graduation through the student’s College email account, and the diploma will be mailed to the address on file.”

Nowhere does it say that part of the “automatic process” to “automatically be award” his degree does it say he needs to apply for said degree.


Sorry for the long winded response, but maybe the 10 or 20 minutes to read it will save someone hours of frustration later. I got 25 hours into fixing other people’s mistakes. Step one is convincing them they made the mistake in the first place and some people really dig in on that.

Plus I’m waiting in my sister-in-law’s 85 degree condo for the AC guy to show up between 10 and noon and have nothing better to do.

Guys, great stories! It gives me hope it will work out for him. When we walked in to check-in for the move in, he had two students he who remembered him from orientation say hi to him by name.

There was no changing roommates when I attended college. After your Freshman year you were again assigned a roommate based on your GPA and your graduating class. Jocks did not have a separate dorm.

Freshman year in a two-room, four-person on campus setup with shared kitchen, bath with one shower/toilet and two sinks.

My suite mate was a good friend from high school. He was a complete and total slob it turns out, we had to establish a line of demarcation mid room. Complete asshole to everyone in building, only slightly less so to me.

He majored in ΣΑΕ and apparently had the drinking part down. After first quarter he was on academic probation with Auburn, after three suspended and never to return. He's still tending bar.

Other two guys were nice, developed a good friendship with the one whose life didn't center around peak-tanning-hours. A friendship that lasted many years until he became the first of our peer group to die of brain tumor at about 40.

Wife had a similar mix of awful and great. For many it really is the first time you have to sort through how to manage challenging relationships on your own. Some succeed, some fail, but all will learn something about personal interactions that probably shapes their skills with that forever.

Sometimes our kids are the assholes in the room, don't be fooled by that not being a possibility. Not necessarily directed at OP, but in general. My son was this at a particularly bad phase of his life.

Missouri has something like your Bright Futures called Bright Flight, all they cared about was ACT score, if you got a 30 you received $2,000/yr, which in 2000 covered about half your tuition, but at that point you would pretty much get a full scholarship to any Missouri state university. I don't think you had to maintain any GPA to keep it.

I took the ACT 6 times to get that damn thing. I was going to keep taking it until my score dropped, I got 27, 28, 29, 29, 29 and then a 33. I had a full scholarship once I had a 29, they upped it to a full scholarship and I got to pocket the $2,000 each year as a stipend after I received a 33. I went to Truman State University, a place nobody outside of Missouri knows about. If I had gotten it earlier than the spring of my senior year in HS I would have been a Pershing Scholar and received some travel abroad deal also. I just wanted to get Bright Flight and beat my girlfriend who had received a 31 (her first time).

I had pretty mediocre grades my freshman year and was put on notice I would lose my full scholarship but would still keep my Bright Flight. I wrote an appeal that my performance was due to my incompatible roommate who had used his Bright Flight money to buy an electric base guitar and amplifier and would rock out to Tool and Filter. They let me keep it another semester as long as I got a 3.25 that semester....which I didn't. Shrug.

I guess university housing figured 2 nerds that could do well on the ACT would get along, I think we spoke 12 words to each other during the whole year.

quote:

I took the ACT 6 times to get that damn thing

waltz got a 17 on ACT. lol Do not feel bad.

I spent so many Saturday mornings taking it I felt like I was in nerd detention. I was Anthony Hall in The Breakfast Club without the Ally Sheedy and Molly Ringwald.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

quote:

Originally posted by PHPaul:

single room in Japan and was an E4

Your navy was very different from mine. I was E5 and shared a bedroom with 85 other guys -- NAS Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico.

Part of that was being in the right place at the right time, part of it was the line of work I was in (watchstanding on a rotating Day/Mid/Eve shift), and part of it was just dumb luck.

A few months ago, my son told me one the girls on the swim team got a 540 on the SAT. I asked, math or English. He said no 540 COMBINED. She’s got an athletic scholarship to some school somewhere though.

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
Dont feel bad. My daughter was paired with a suicidal and clinically depressed roommate. It will work out.

Da fuq?

Aren't you a doctor? You do know mental insanity is highly contagious, don't you? You stick around crazy people long enough, you become crazy too.

ETA: Never mind. I see you did do something about it.

Not to derail this too bad, but Florida also gives in state tuition prices to grand children of residents, even if the grandchild lives in another state. Lots of people don't know that one.

Not a derailment at all. That’s great information!

According to this article, Link, the student needs to score in the 89th percentile on the SAT, ACT or CLT and there’s only 350 waivers available. Those waivers are divided between the Florida’s public universities. In other words, 350 grandchildren can all get waivers to UF. Also, the student has to be accepted to the university they want to apply for a waiver at.

I started out in a triple. We were all a good match. One guy transferred after freshman year but I kept the other roommate the remaining three.

I lucked-out and didn't have a roommate my Frosh year but, Soph year I got two. One of them we've remained close friends since, the other was an obnoxious ass that I got into a fight with after he used my toothbrush to brush his own teeth. He ended up couch-surfing with others since we wore-out his welcome with us.