Cascadilla Hall Dorm Reviews at Cornell

The staff and RA’s at Cascadilla are wonderful. They are extremely friendly and helpful, and I always feel welcome to ask them about anything; they answered most of my questions about Cornell when I arrived on campus this semester. However, Cascadilla Hall is located on South Campus, which is very far away from the Main Central Campus (where most events and classes take place). This makes it difficult to attend classes, meet new people, be involved in school events, contact professors and TAs, etc. Furthermore, there is no dining hall that is walking distance from Cascadilla in the morning — the closest dining hall does not open until 11am for lunch. Many of the bus stops near Cascadilla are closed for maintenance and construction, which means that you would have to walk quite some time before you are able to reach a place to eat. Additionally, on the first day I moved into Cascadilla, the bathroom was very unsanitary — toilets were unflushed and the ground was littered with soaked toilet paper pieces. It doesn’t help that the hallways smell bad, especially the fourth floor, which smells like cigarettes. The students here also do poorly in maintaining public common areas like the shared kitchen and bike room, where they store their belongings that stink up the rooms. People also leave their trash bags in the hallway rather than throwing them in the dumpster behind Cascadilla. The laundry room closes without warning and nobody knows the reason why it’s closed, and the elevators break down often when someone holds the door open for too long. On many occasions, I’ve had to wait over 6 or 7 minutes for an elevator (most students choose to walk up and down the stairs at that point). There is no AC in Cascadilla, nor are we allowed to install our own AC units; this makes it extremely stuffy in the room. Moreover, Cornell is currently doing construction on the Cascadilla windows, although it is unclear what is being fixed about the windows. The windows are only able to open about an inch or two, making ventilation impossible in our dorms. The walls are scratched up and the desks are old and chipped. The first floor is underground with no windows, making the hallways unwelcoming, ominous, and intimidating.