Dorm Life

St. Andrew's students live in one of six boys' dorms or eight girls' dorms. Third, IV, and V Form students live in dormitories by gender and by form. Each residence hall is supervised by one or more members of the faculty, known as the dorm parent, who live in a faculty residence attached to the dorm. Sixth Form students live across all dorms and serve as residential leaders (RLs) of each dorm; they work with dorm parents to lead all aspects of dorm life.

Each dorm features a central common room with basic kitchen facilities. Dorm meetings and functions—such as birthday celebrations, dessert parties, group games and other activities—take place in the common room, which is generally located near the dorm parent apartment. Students live primarily in double rooms, with a few single and triple rooms located throughout campus.

Although our underformers learn a great deal from their corridor parents and seniors, they learn most about themselves and others by living with roommates and sharing a home with students from a wide variety of backgrounds. Our dormitories are remarkable classrooms where students learn the importance of trust, good communication, respect for others, and above all, strong friendships.

Your Community of Care

For incoming students, living on dorm presents a new way of "being at home," with new rituals and responsibilities. Our residential life program is structured to support younger students as they adjust to life at St. Andrew's, and to provide older students with opportunities for leadership as they move toward life after St. Andrew's.

The Dorm Team

Dorm parents have primary responsibility for the students who live with them. Their homes in the dorms are open to students, and they are available and prepared to help students through all the highs and lows of their St. Andrew's experience, and of adolescence in general. Each dorm parent is assisted by a dorm team of three to four other faculty members. Dorm teams spend time with students on dorm each evening from 7:45 to 11:00 PM, help students coordinate dorm functions, and support each dorm's senior student leadership team. The seniors who live on each dorm are responsible for most of the day-to-day leadership and life on dorm. Seniors host dorm functions, hold meetings, work with the dorm parent to resolve any issues that may arise between residents, supervise nightly check-ins, and more. 

The Advising System

Every student has a faculty advisor; new students are assigned an advisor, and returning students choose their advisor each year. In bi-weekly meetings, your advisor will mentor and guide you in all aspects of life at St. Andrew's, from the academic to the social and everything in between. Each faculty member has up to eight advisees at a time, who get together in a group regularly for "advisory functions"—dinners at your advisor's home, birthday parties, off-campus excursions—and gather for midmorning break once a week. Your advisory will become your "mini-family" on campus. 

Big/Little Siblings

Each new student is paired with a student mentor in the senior class; mentoring a younger student is the most important responsibility of a senior at St. Andrew's. 

At St. Andrew's, you are living in an environment where you are surrounded by people who care about you. I can think of countless moments where friends and teachers showed me incredible kindness that inspired me to be a kinder person myself. A senior once told me that asking a faculty member to meet with you for no apparent reason, or just to talk about life, is a completely acceptable thing to do and they will say yes. That advice was life-changing and led me to have six advisors instead of one.
Piper Jackman ’21

Campus Stewardship

St. Andrew's provides its students with facilities, equipment, and other material resources to a degree equaled by few schools in the world, and its students take pride their responsibility for maintaining all that has been so freely given to them. Students do daily work to care for the school's buildings, rooms, and equipment. Each student is assigned a daily job in a certain area of the school, the majority of which are on dorm. Each job takes five to ten minutes, and all are rotated regularly. Responsibilities include taking out dorm trash and recycling; vacuuming the halls; and cleaning common rooms and kitchen areas each morning.

All members of the school community are expected to participate in the ongoing care of buildings, common spaces, and grounds. To this end, students, faculty, and staff gather several times a year for major campus clean-up projects.

The school also expects each student to maintain his or her room in an orderly fashion; dorm faculty inspect rooms each morning.