The Frederick Gunn School is a small, close-knit community. The friends you make here - sharing a room, hanging out in the common room, talking with your dorm parent, eating pizza or helping a classmate out with math - are often your friends for life - ask our alumni, they will tell you!
Dorm life at The Frederick Gunn School is all about community. It’s about finding your friend group and learning to live respectfully with others. More than any other space on campus, the dorm becomes a home away from home. It’s where students learn to be independent, manage their time and become self-reliant. “You have to wake up to an alarm. You have to keep your room neat. You have to get to class on time. Those are big life skills,”
“Our students know how to take the trash out, whether it’s a dorm job or from their own room. Some of them from freshman year on know how to do their laundry. They know how to regulate their sleep. That’s actually a problem in today’s society. It’s gone from I’ll watch ‘The Tonight Show’ to I’ll stay up to 3 a.m. streaming Netflix. They’re learning how to turn their technology off and go to bed,”
To be successful academically, he suggests finding a study space that works for you. Freshmen are required to study in their dorm room during the first half of freshmen year. After that, students can choose from studying in the dorm, in the library or in the Thomas S. Perakos Arts and Community Center. The goal is to figure out what works best for you. “Once you learn that here, you’ll have a huge advantage over the other kids at college.”
To succeed socially, students need to do little more than keep the door to their room open, spend time in the common room, and get to know each other. Balben also recommends joining a fall team or co-curricular with a lot of people involved “whatever it is you choose to do. If you have an interest, even if it’s a slight interest, go do that cocurricular. If you kind of like acting but you’ve never done it, just go do the fall play. The faculty will find a role that will suit you and then you’ll be around people who like the same thing you do. If you like football, even if it’s just an interest, join the eight-person football team. Even if you see yourself from the perspective of, ‘I’m only good at this one sport,’ then you’ll have more fun playing the other sports because of the camaraderie.”
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