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Residential College

Welcome to the Broome Street Residential College!

We’re excited that you’ll be with us for the second year of this exciting program at NYU. The Broome Street Residential Education staff, including CDE Omar Miranda, Faculty Fellows in Residence (Brad Lewis and Jo Rendell, Bryan Waterman and Stephanie Smith-Waterman), the Faculty Affiliates and RAs all look forward to building a new kind of learning/living community in the coming years.

Please take a moment to look over this brief overview of the RC’s opening activities and larger principles and aims. If you have questions or comments, please feel free to send them via email over the coming weeks.

The Residential College at Broome Street has two principal aims: 1) To bring residents into closer intellectual and social contact with one another and with faculty than sometimes is the case at NYU, with an opportunity for continuing students to remain a part of the community; and 2) To bring you into a more intimate relationship with the surrounding city – including neighborhood communities, cultural institutions, and historic traditions – than you might be on your own.

To these ends, the Residential College will sponsor several types of programs; you’ll be invited to participate in and help develop them in any or all of them in the coming year.

In addition to leading occasional outings for cultural events in the city at large, the Faculty Fellows in Residence will have a regular round of programs in the building to help facilitate relationships among residents. Once or twice a month, Brad Lewis and Jo Rendell host the Broome Street Café in their apartment (412), where residents can read the Sunday paper, enjoy bagels, coffee, and juice, and talk about news or school. They also sponsor “Big Ideas” discussions drawn from current issues and events, sometimes based on readings from the New Yorker or other publications. Bryan Waterman and Stephanie Smith-Waterman host the monthly Salon 712, which offers residents a space to perform or otherwise showcase talents or work for an audience of peers and, often, professionals in your field. The Smith-Watermans also sponsor a Downtown Book Club that meets a couple times a semester to discuss fiction and non-fiction related to the neighborhoods we live in. If you have ideas for any of these regular events – or would like to volunteer to lead a discussion or perform at the salon – please contact us over the summer! We’re interested in generating a diverse set of in-building programs based on your interests.

In addition to these general programs, each of you has been assigned to a specific programming “stream” according to your expressed interests. For 2008-2009, our streams include the following: Big Ideas (current events and contemporary culture); The City Is a Page (writing and reading in urban contexts); Gender and Sexuality (queer theory and culture; feminism; masculinity studies); Arts and Culture (theater, fine arts, music); Downtown Scenes (historic neighborhoods, food, culture, and style in lower Manhattan, pas and present); Eco-Broome (environmental issues, local and global); Health, Culture, and the Humanities (medicine and health in everyday life and contemporary culture); Philosophy (classical and postmodern). Your stream will serve as a home base for your participation in the community, introducing you to residents and faculty affiliates throughout the residential college who share your core interests. You’re encouraged, though, to participate in as many activities as appeal to you, regardless of the stream from which it originates. If you have particular ideas for programming in your stream, contact the Faculty Fellows over the summer!

You’re also invited to participate in Hall Council and the Residential College Board, the latter of which will be given judicial responsibilities in the college and will help select future residents. Contact CDE Omar Miranda for more information. The Residential College will also sponsor a blog, with regular contributions from residents. If you’re interested in writing for the blog (food and concert reviews, accounts of activities, opinion pieces), contact Bryan Waterman. Last year our building blog was hosted at http://broomestreetblog.blogspot.com, where you can find some record of the building’s activities in spring 2008; by the beginning of fall semester we will have shifted our account to NYU’s new blog service. Stay tuned for the new URL.

Again, we’re looking forward to meeting you in the fall and glad you’ll be a member of our second year at the Residential College.

Best wishes for an enjoyable summer,

The Broome Street Res College Faculty and Staff

Broome Street Streams

Big Ideas: Contemporary Culture (current events, politics, media, social justice issues, warfare, the economy)
In Big Ideas, residents talk about issues like culture, media, politics, social justice, current events, the economy, warfare, and anything else that may force them to ask, “What's going on in the larger context?” This stream is all about thinking in new ways about situations that affect each of us.

  

City is a Page (writing, reading for pleasure, The New Yorker, poetry, literary events)
New York City is a page, a poem, a novel, a text to be written and read, a song, a symphony, a muse, and much more. City is a Page urges participants to view the world around them as a writer would. Immersion in New York City's vibrant literary world in concert with in-house readings, workshops, and guest writers incites residents to hone in on their singular voices and experiences.

 

Gender and Sexuality (queer theory, feminism, identity development, conceptions of masculinity)
This stream explores topics of queer theory, feminism, sexuality, femininity, masculinity, gender roles and identities. To that end, we will introduce a variety of programs, some casual and intimate, others more formal and open to the larger NYU community. Past programs have explored a variety of topics, such as pornography, virginity, monogamy, and notions of “normal” or “natural” sex. We approach each topic from diverse disciplinary and political perspectives and with a healthy dose of curiosity and enthusiasm. We hope that these experiences promote deeper understandings of ourselves, each other, and our surrounding communities within the context of a welcoming, safe, and accepting environment.

  

Arts and Culture
The Arts and Culture Stream is devoted to exposing its members to the wealth of artistic and cultural expression New York City has to offer.  It encourages students to become active contributors to the artistic community in New York, believing that life is itself can be lived artfully, and everyone deserves to experience the vitality a creative life has to offer.  Past activities include: beginner graffiti and break dancing lessons, behind the scenes at the MET, the Broome Open Arts Studio and Sunday in the Park with George.

 

Downtown Scenes (historic neighborhoods, demographic transgression, food, cultural norms)
Explore all that downtown has to offer in this stream! From historical landmarks to fantastic food and shopping, residents will take full advantage of their location at Broome. Residents will see and discuss historic neighborhoods, demographic transitions, food, and cultural norms.

  

Eco-Broome (related to the environment-globally and locally)
Eco-Broome is designed to provide opportunities for you to learn, speak, and explore environmental issues through stimulating experiences. We will host discussions with industry professionals who work in fields that have the environment in mind. Additionally, there are a number of excursions to explore environmental impacts, see what organizations are doing in response to the climatic changes, and to experience the nature that exists in and around the city.

  

Health, Culture, and Society (implications of health/culture/society in daily life)
What is culture? What is health? How do these concepts relate to one another other? In the globalized society of the 21st century, health issues have cut across borders and cultures. In this stream, we explore the different dynamics of health, culture, and society. More specifically, we shed light on how different societies have dealt with health issues in a variety of different contexts. We also discuss the way in which socioeconomic status can impact not only the health status of an individual but society as a whole. Finally, we seek to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities so that we may look at society through a more analytic lens.

 

Philosophy and Psychology
Philosophy and Psychology are not just a collection of abstract theories but rather ways of engaging with life—a dialogue with oneself and the world one inhabits. The “PhiloPsych” Stream provides a way for you to begin this discussion with yourself, your peers and the city of New York at large. After all, the only thing better than discovering New York is discovering yourself through it. This will be an active stream, asking not only for your time (and really- what is time?) but also a willingness to participate in our bi-monthly events and symposiums. Let’s show New York that, “when one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets” (Nietzsche).

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Broome Street Lottery System

For the purposes of the ResCollege lottery, each resident will be given a score. The score will be determined by adding together assigned scores based on the application grade and semesters of participation in the residential college as follows:

High Pass = 4 points 4 semesters = 4 points
Pass = 3 points 3 semesters = 3 points
Low Pass = 2 points 2 semesters = 2 points
1 semester = 1 point

ex. High Pass and 4 semesters participation: 4 + 4 = 8 points
Pass and 2 semesters participation: 3 + 2 = 5 points

* If students are going into the lottery on their own, this sum will be their “lottery score”.
* If students are going into the lottery with other students, their sums will be averaged together to produce a group “lottery score”


The lottery scores will then be ranked based on academic year. Thus, if a senior and a junior both have a score of 6, the senior will be higher in the “lottery order.”

From within each specific pool the “lottery order” will be assigned at random.

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Broome Street Application Criteria

The faculty, staff, and College Board members will evaluate each application.  Each application will then be assigned one of the following grades:
                        High Pass
                        Pass
                        Low Pass
                        Fail
 
Those students displeased with their evaluation will get a chance to appeal the decision through the Residential College Board the week before spring break.

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