During my first year at the Georgia Institute of Technology I stayed in the Towers dorms as part of the Freshman Experience program.

The GT Housing website offers this information about Towers:

Location	East Campus
Avg Room Size	15'x10'9"
Gender	All Male
Floors / # of Rooms	4 / 254
Furniture	Towers features traditional two-person rooms furnished with a bed (with extra-long mattress), desk, desk chair, lockable footlocker, wardrobe and dresser per resident.
Lounge	A large TV lounge on the 1st floor. Two lounges on 2nd floor, one with a ping-pong table and the other with a small table for studying. Two lounges on the thrid floor, one with a tv.
Other	Towers is Great!*

*The GT website makes no such claim

In addition to the standard 2-person rooms, there were also several 4 person rooms. I was assigned to one of these. It turned out to be great thanks to what can only be considered a horrible construction error. You see, in the 4 person rooms, there is a wall/door in the middle which would ideally divide them into two identical rooms. However in our room this wall had been misplaced.

Had I been assigned to the smaller room, I would have been quite unhappy. But life was better on our side.

My room was 101. It was slightly underground, so when you look out the window you see dirt. Then at the top are either empty beer bottles or sleeping homeless people. We were on the side closest to downtown, so there were many homeless people around.

This was my room during 2nd semester, I believe. I tried to place pictures of rollercoasters over all of the holes in the wall.

The room itself wasn't horrible. If they repainted it, patched the holes, and replaced that bed that is about to collapse then it would be a pretty decent place. The real problem with Towers was encountered when you left the room. The first thing you would encounter is the lounge. This was a large room with no windows. It had a small tv, some beat up furniture, a foosball table which was conveniently missing the ball and some of the men, and a couple tables. It was very humid and mold would grow on the walls whenever the dehumidifier broke. Because there were no windows, time seemed to stand still. This resulted in us playing poker until dawn without realizing it. While we did have some good times in the lounge, it really does need some work.

The restrooms were the worst part of Towers. The showers all had problems. Some had only cold water. Others had no pressure. A few were so powerful that they actually hurt. The housing staff did a decent job of cleaning the restrooms, but only during the week. So the weekends were a disaster. They were about on the same level as a gas station bathroom, and not a Shell or Exxon either: we're talking the lowest quality you can find. Maybe QT, actually that might even be too good. I went home on most weekends, so fortunately I didn't have to put up with it too much.

As part of the Freshman Experience program, we were assigned a PL. This is an upperclassman who sets up events for the freshman in his hall to hang out together. Our PL was a guy named Jay. He did a really good job and made me like Tech a lot more than I would have otherwise. We went to baseball games, CampusMovieFest at the Fox, a dinner or two, and some ice cream trips. He was able to get most of this paid for through GA Tech Housing.

I am now in Woodruff South, a 4 person "suite." It is a big upgrade over Towers, but I am still looking forward to going somewhere else.

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© 2006 Andrew Susky