This school year marks year three of Bradford Milligan Hall housing students. With it still being such a new space on campus it is highly sought after for the student population.
Photo courtesy of Paul Vernon via the OWU Flickr.
Bradford Milligan Hall was created based on Residential Life’s 2018 student surveys that showed a high interest for seniors to have an opportunity to live in an apartment style space. At full capacity the Bradford Milligan apartments can hold 124 students. Students interested in living in the apartments must be at a senior credit status and have accepted each of their roommates on the reslife portal.
If this is completed by Residential Life’s assigned time frame for the school year, students will later receive an email letting them know if they are eligible and then will be given an assigned time slot to log in and select a room in the building. Time slots are determined by the group of students' average amount of credits.
Director of Residential Life, Brian Emerick, shares that in creating the apartments himself and his team “were pretty thoughtful-we didn’t want to build it too big and not have enough interest to fill it, but we also wanted to offer enough space for most of the seniors who want to live there.”
As many are aware there are quite a few dorm buildings on campus that host only a small number of students or that are no longer housing students at all. Bradford Milligan is a space that should remain at full capacity, give or take a few instances. While Emerick explains the reasoning for the apartment size he also discusses the various other campus living options senior students might prefer to take in like a SLU, a fraternity house, or other specialty houses.
With all this in mind Emerick says that reslife also still acknowledges that “there are always a few students who want to live in the apartments, but have a later housing selection time and therefore aren’t able to select an apartment like they had planned. The good news in all of this is that students really like Bradford Milligan Hall and want to live there, so we’re excited about that.”
Photo courtesy of owu.edu.
And it’s true, the students who get the opportunity to live in the apartments have really great things to share about their experience. The apartments allow students to have a living space that fosters cooking skills, roommate bonding in their living room space, all while still having their own individual bedroom space to relax and study with the exception of some of the 6 resident apartments and all of the 8 resident rooms.
One of the biggest differences between living in one of the other spaces on campus compared to living in the apartments is the meal plan. When living in the apartment students have different meal plan options that focus more on them cooking food in their apartment rather than eating in the dining halls. Senior Sophie Gipson is able to provide her insight: “I personally really enjoy that there’s a specific meal plan with living in this building because I think living in this style of apartment makes it so you can cook and I think that’s something really important to learn as a senior who is about to leave and maybe live on their own.”
The only thing Gipson thinks could be improved is adding some off campus dining dollars to this plan if possible. All students get tired and sometimes cooking for the night is a chore. Picking up some food would be really convenient, Gipson also adds.
The students living in the apartments haven’t really had any complaints around campus except for sometimes being too cold, which is a problem many other students without air conditioning are constantly wishing for.
Senior, Sisi Fish, shares her enjoyment of living in the building: “I really like the amount of space that we have and that we are able to decorate the apartment to suit our own individual tastes. I feel like my own apartment especially is really cozy and it feels really homey and I like being able to feel at home in the space that I’m living in.”
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