Animal House

There was a moment, just one, where I realized that I was a long way from home. It happened when I was sitting in my hallway during the middle of the night one evening with most of my floormates, and talking as good friends. However unremarkable it appears, we have been living in close proximity for just over 2 weeks, and for the majority of that, we've been sleeping, in class, or eating. Yet in that time, the people I was sitting with that evening were my friends, and, at least on my floor, family.
Simply making friends is nothing new, but the openness and the depth of the conversation revealed much more. The members of my floor and I had absorbed, synthesized, and were now making judgments of one another after 14 days of sporadic contact. This massive leap in knowledge was due to the dormitory style of living at Drexel.
It's a well-known fact that those students who choose to commute need to work a lot more to build a repore with fellow students, because the common experiences shared occur only in the sterile environment of a classroom. Living on campus, by contrast, means interacting with people under every circumstance, from elevators in the morning to cooking during pancake dinner night for the floor. The combination of encounters allows students to develop a mental image of a person much faster than the time commuter students spend in class with the same people.
My point in all this is not to make the commuter students feel more ostericized than they already are, but rather to point out the amazing categorization skills that Stephen Johnson mentions in his book, Everything Bad is Good for You, and how they are in play in a dorm. From the volume of details of each interaction with people at unexpected times, a database evolves. The database categorizes the emotions, attitude, and underlying characterization based on how that person acts in that time. From that, assumptions and logical conclusions fill in the gaps to create a complete view of that person. But that is not the end of it. From that hypothetical model, changes are made to each category when further interactions occur, yielding a different result than predicted. To give a visual comparison, chiseling a marble statue begins with rough approximations, fine tuned over time. Our image of people rapidly focuses down to pinpoint accuarcy because our minds are taking the leaps and bounds nessasary to enable such fraternity in two short weeks.
Drexel creates a melting pot of experiences when they drop a floor full of freshmen into the same hundred square feet. From that melting pot, there is a constant intelligence gained through the interactions between people when you least expected it. All the casual fraternizing that distracts us from our studies is really a study of people. We are learning so much about human interactions without ever noticing, so much about what it means to be human.