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Armed with your material possessions, mom and dad in tow, you eagerly enter your college  

dorm room

  for the first time. The stark walls and cheap mattress call you to make them your own. You are immediately excited by thoughts of unpacking posters of your favorite bands, pictures of your friends, and all the best stuff from your bedroom at home.

What you don't know yet is that this is not just your bedroom.... A dorm room encompasses every aspect of a new college student's life--it is a place where you'll socialize, study, eat, party, relax, exercise, date, cook, play, read, sleep, and clean (sometimes).

Like other college students, students at Seattle University (SU), Seattle, WA, find more uses for dorm rooms (and the furniture in them) than you would think possible. These 12-by-14 rooms double as kitchens, bars, living rooms, dance clubs, movie theaters, video arcades, and gyms, among other things--sometimes against hall rules.

After all, when freshmen aren't studying or sleeping, they're spending a significant amount of their free time in the dorms. Some college students bunk their beds and move in garage-sale sofas to make rooms more comfortable. For most though, beds themselves double as couches. SU junior Chris Canlas has a tattered old couch and a small TV in his room, but says that two of his floormates have gone a step further by turning their entire room into an entertainment center.

More than a handful of college students have big screen TVs in their dorms. They also have video games, computers, DVD players, and stereos. One student even set up strobe lights and a DJ mixer in his room, according to Drew Herdener, a resident assistant (RA) at SU. Like students before him, this music man hosts dance parties. Until RAs break up the party, unbelievable numbers of new college students pack into any dorm room where the action is on a Friday night.

Dorm rooms at Seattle University have reached maximum capacity many times, especially when students decide to have some fun by breaking the rules. Jim Schmidt, a three-year dorm resident, and his floormates decided to throw one of the craziest fiestas ever in SU dorm room history--a pool party.

Jim's original idea was to run a "slip and slide" down the hall. But when his friends saw inflatable pools suspended from a toy store's ceiling, their wild plan got even wilder. Back at the dorms, they emptied a senior's room and filled the pool with hot water, creating a 10-foot wide plastic bathtub. His dorm room immediately became a tropical oasis. "Suddenly there were like 23 people inside the pool and other people lounging around," he says. As expected, the party was eventually shut down at about midnight, but it remains a legend at SU to this day.

Although many wild memories like these are created in the dorms, they are first and foremost the centers of everyday life. College students unhappy with dining hall meals often eat in their rooms, and some even set up kitchenettes--complete with hot plates, refrigerators, and microwaves. During her sophomore year, Mandy Okazaki's floormates could smell her garlicky stir-fry concoctions cooking almost every night. As for those students who eat meals elsewhere, their closets and bookshelves usually double as pantries for snacks like cereal and potato chips.

All these activities are only a sample of the innumerable ways creative college students have found to cope with life in a dorm room. At that anxious moment when you glance over your new room for the first time, it is impossible to predict all the uses you will find for everything in it. Until you live in the dorms for a while yourself, you'll have to wait to see the amazing way that beds double as couches and study areas as dance floors. Soon you and your roommate, along with hundreds of other freshmen, will together experience the magic of life in your own box.

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