From the doorway of her first-floor room in West Holden Hall, psychology sophomore Erin Bone watched as her neighbors - both male and female - filed past with belongings on Thursday.
This semester, the formerly sex-segregated floors on the first floor of both West and East Holden Hall have changed to coed-by-suite floors, which many students and parents have warmly embraced.
"I love it," Bone said as the sounds of an intense round of video game football between her male neighbors filtered down the hall.
Speaking from her experience on a same-sex floor last year, she said the hormone-saturated atmosphere created by an all-male or all-female group can become stifling, resulting in drama - or petty conflicts. Bone said she feels living alongside the opposite sex might smooth such things over.
"You're big enough to be here (in college), so you should be able to handle it," she said.
All of MSU's residence halls are coed buildings, but only a fraction of the floors within these buildings have both male and female residents living on them.
Angela Brown, director of University Housing, said there are coed-by-suite floors in Case, Holden, Wilson, Wonders, Holmes, Owen and McDonel halls. Brown said all of the coed floors in each of these halls can house about 1,700 students. Each year, about 14,000 students live in the residence halls.
Changes to a floor's environment, such as going coed, alcohol- and smoke-free and establishing quiet floors, are initiated by the residents themselves, Brown said. University staff only serve to review and approve the changes. First, a certain percentage of residents must approve the new option by petition.
To change the floor's environment, "Have some conversation on the floor, then work with the in-hall staff," Brown said. "Part of that is getting agreement from those on the floor."
Usually, there are about three to five requests for new environmental options per year, Brown said. "By December, we'll start to see requests coming in," she said. Bryan Williams, a premedical sophomore living on the first floor of West Holden Hall, was among those last year who signed the petition to make the floor coed.
"I thought it'd be a different experience," Williams said. "The few girls (from the floor) I've met have been pretty cool."
Many parents of students living on coed floors said they trust their sons and daughters to make the right decisions and to adjust well to this type of living arrangement.
Bone's suitemate in Holden Hall, education sophomore Emily Lewalski, said her mom sat her down to discuss living in a coed hall and was, to her surprise, comfortable with the arrangement.
While helping her daughter move into the new room, Karen Lewalski said she's confident Holden Hall will be a safe place to live based on Emily's experiences there last year. She said she trusts her daughter, and living with guys should be no problem.
"She has a brother and she's used to living with all of his friends around," Karen Lewalski said. "I really didn't have a problem with it."
Some residents said they did have concerns about the coed residential situation, but that the change was more positive than negative.
Megan McFarland, a human biology junior and one of the two resident mentors on the first floor of West Holden Hall, mentioned relationships as one of her concerns.
"If you're dating the person across the hall and it doesn't work out, it could make for a really tense living situation," she said.
Nevertheless, McFarland said she was excited about the dynamic between male and female students, which promises to be different from her first year as a mentor on an all-female floor.
The mentor on the other side of West Holden Hall, first-year mentor and applied engineering sciences junior Daryl Flanagan, echoed many of these sentiments. He said the idea makes sense because when floors aren't coed, girls and guys are always going to the other side of the hall to meet, anyway.
Both mentors shared the view that living with a more diverse group of people would make for a more interesting experience.
"It's not just about hooking up with somebody," Flanagan said. "It's about making friends."
Tom Cooke can be reached at cooketho@msu.edu.
