Home
Clarkson Ignite
Virtual Map
player return

Life at Clarkson

Living/Learning Communities

At Clarkson, nearly all of our undergraduate students live on our 640-acre wooded and riverfront campus in Potsdam, New York.

  • Students live in either traditional residence halls, suite-style halls or on-campus apartments, depending on their interests and class years. We also have Greek and theme housing as well.
  • Newer additions to the first-year residential experience at Clarkson are our living and learning communities, where students with similar interests live together and participate in programs that cater to their academic, social and personal needs.
  • Examples of living and learning communities include: Outdoor Enthusiasts, Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE), The Golden Gamers, The Artists’ Guild, Cultural Enrichment, Sustainability, FIRST Robotics, ROTC, Movie Fanatics, STEM Education, Men in Business, Pre-Health Professionals, Foodies, Live FIT, Go Knights! and the Honors Program.

All freshmen are required to be part of a Living Learning Community. A Living Learning Community is a place where people who have similar interests live together. And the Resident Advisors host events that are on those shared interests. So some examples of the LLCs would be Cultural Cuisine, which is for those students that have an aptitude for cooking, or if they just are interested in learning different types of foods. There's First Connection, which is a resource and also living learning community. For those who might be first-generation students. There's also the Women in STEM and the Men in STEM floors. They do offer a lot of opportunities to network with other people in your major and in your department. So it's a good opportunity to get to know them.

When I was a freshman, I was on the Outdoor Enthusiast floor. So that's the floor, you know, centered around hiking and just getting outdoors. And so I went on hikes with some people on my floor. I also went snowboarding for the first time. So it's an immediate way to like know that the people that are living on your floor, have some sort of shared interest with you. And so it's a lot easier going in and talking to them because you have that talking point, and you can make friends a lot easier.

But during your time here at Clarkson, there's a lot of different types of housing that you'll probably stay in as a freshman you start in traditional-style housing where you know, there's a bathroom at each end of the hallway and you share a double and then as you move up there's more traditional housing or there's a suite-style housing, and there also is an apartment-style housing that's generally for seniors and that's where you get access to a kitchen and all that kind of stuff.