By Chantal Barlow, Contributing Writer
If you go to Asbury, you hear the word ‘community’ on a weekly, if not daily, basis. It’s what everything eventually comes back around to. Asbury is a community in and of itself, and within it, there are smaller communities. In your first couple years here, you most likely live in one of the four dorms on campus: Glide-Crawford, Kresge, Johnson or Trustees. By the time you’re an upperclassman, you are usually biased toward one of the dorms, but you also have the option to apply to live in the Aldersgate apartments. All of these smaller living communities within Asbury are profitable in different ways. There are pros and cons to both the dorms and the apartments, and ultimately, every person is different and needs different things.
In the dorms at Asbury, you usually have a roommate and live on a hall of men or women and a Resident Assistant (RA) and Spiritual Life Assistant (SLA). Halls come together weekly at spiritual meetings called Gather, have hall dinners and hall events together. In the apartments, you live in groups of four or eight students and have an RA for each building. I’ve heard from quite a few students that they have been told by both Residence Life staff and other students that Aldersgate is where community goes to die. But the truth is that it’s just a different kind of community.
The biggest difference in regard to community is that in the dorms, you are provided with the people you live with on the hall and you are assigned an RA and an SLA. In the apartments, you are given an RA for the building, but you choose all of the people that you apply to live with. There is no SLA in the apartments, but in a way, your roommates become an SLA supplement. Community in the dorms is awesome because it’s already all set up for you, but it’s also awesome in the apartments because you have to make an effort and start learning how you will maintain community in the world outside of Asbury.
I’ve experienced both types of communities, and while I do prefer the freedom and responsibility that comes with living in the apartments, both have been beneficial for me at different points in my college career. I met some of my best friends on my hall in Glide-Crawford. We ate snacks in our rooms, chatted in the morning as we walked down the hall to the shared bathroom and lived each day together on our hall. This fall, I moved into an apartment with a group of girls whom I barely knew but who have become some of my closest friends and people whom I know I can rely on and talk to about life, spirituality and relationships. We cook meals together, sit in our living room and apply for jobs and host parties together. Life in the dorms is the classic college experience, but community doesn’t die in the apartments; it flourishes in a unique way that differs from life in the dorms.
