Facilities
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The courtyard and the dining hall are the most important social spaces for every residential college community. Warm weather brings barbecues, sunbathers, frisbees, footballs, and baseball mitts to the college courtyards, inspiring frequent games of two-hand touch, catch, and even the occasional water gun fight. Stone walls, swings, and benches provide a haven for quiet moments with a book or a friend. All twelve colleges have their own dining facilities, which range in style from medieval halls with vaulted ceilings to wood-paneled colonial banquet rooms to dramatic modern spaces with large windows and unexpected angles. Each residential college dining hall is a place where students can count on seeing tables filled with people they know. As they linger over meals, students cement friendships, engage in stimulating conversation, plan social events, and discover and develop shared interests. Foreign language tables bring together students and faculty who wish to converse in French, Portuguese, Russian, Vietnamese, Japanese, or Swahili, to name just a few. Some colleges sponsor regular discussion tables on such topics as film, architecture, science and technology, and the classics. |
Additional Resources |
After hours, the residential college dining halls are host to student dramatic productions, singing group jams, musical concerts, dance performances, lectures, political debates, and poetry readings. On certain weekends during the year, the tables are cleared away to make room for casual dance parties or formal balls.
Every residential college maintains such facilities as:
• libraries, which can be used as a study or research space at any time of day or night
• 24-hour computer clusters (with Macs, PCs, scanners, copiers, and fax machines)
• seminar rooms
• large common rooms with couches and pianos
• laundry facilities
• music practice rooms
• recreation rooms (with pool, Ping-Pong, and foosball tables)
• entertainment rooms (with big-screen TVs)
• exercise rooms (with cardio equipment and weights)
• basketball and squash/racquetball courts
• kitchens
• student-run snack bars, open late into the night
Some of the colleges also have small theaters, which provide alternative performance or rehearsal spaces for the many theatrical productions that Yale students organize every semester. Some colleges also have letterpress printshops, design studios for laying out a student publication, pottery studios, woodshops, metalsmithing studios, recording studios, film editing facilities, and even indoor rock climbing walls and saunas.
Because of the sense of community fostered by each residential college, more than eighty-five percent of undergraduates elect to live on campus for all four years.
