The Pentagon

My dorm, Jackson Hall, is in the "Pentagon" on the LSU campus. The Pentagon consists of four dorms, Jackson, Taylor, Beauregard, and Lejune. At the bottom of the Pentagon is a smaller building with a small mini-mart in it and a place to do laundry. Each dorm in the Pentagon is not like your typical dorm, where everyone is on "floors" with an RA for every floor, or for sections of floors for larger buildings. Instead, the Pentagon dorms are divided into 5 "stacks." A "stack" is a stairwell 3 floors high, with 4 rooms and a bathroom on each floor. On the first floor, one room is a storage/maintanence room, and on the second floor, one of the rooms is a kitchen, where floor (or in this case, "stack") meetings are held. There is one RA for each stack. It is a different living environment from your typical dorm with a long hallway with 20-40 people in the hallway. There are 27 people in each stack, plus the one RA.

The Pentagon also provides a great social atmosphere. In the center of all the buildings (obviously, in a Pentagon shape) is a courtyard with a number of picnic tables and barbeque grills. At just about any point in time, rain or shine, you will probably be able to find people outside in the courtyard at these picnic table. The courtyard provides a great place to be able to meet people outside just your stack, meeting people from the other buildings. After classes, when the sun is going down and it is getting cooler, all the tables get filled with groups of people gathering together. Even on Monday in the rain, there was still a group at one of the picnic tables. People come out no matter what the weather is. All the other dorms on campus don't have anything close to resembling the Pentagon courtyard. Broussard, right next to the Pentagon has a small courtyard outside the TV/Pool room, but it isn't nearly as large. It also doesn't have as many people in it at any given point in time. People can almost always be found in the courtyard late into the night, usually until at least 1AM, sometimes later. When we didn't have classes, some people were out until 4AM or later. I have classes starting at 8:30 and 7:30, so I obviously wouldn't be able to do that and be able to function well the next day. After a couple days of staying up past 1AM, I would probably end up falling asleep in my 7:30 math class.

Even though the dorm rooms themselves in the Pentagon dorms are probably the worst on campus, being small and crowded (3 to a room for most people, except for some of the girls in some stacks), the social atmosphere in the Pentagon is much more enjoyable than that for other dorms on campus.