Living at St. Mark's
Surrounded by your new EXPLO family of staff, students, and friends, your days will be filled with new ideas, interests, and opinions — expanding your understanding of the world, and encouraging you to rethink your place in it.
Homesickness
At EXPLO, we understand that leaving home for the first time is a scary thing. Our staff works hard with each student to make sure they feel safe, secure, and most of all, at home. For more information, please visit our Safety + Supervision page.
A Home Away from Home
Consider EXPLO your home away from home this summer. Your new roommate could be from New York, California, France, or Japan, and could easily become your new best friend on campus. You’ll both be part of a Living Group of approximately 12 students, led by two Residential Advisors who live on your floor, check on you throughout your day, and keep you informed of what’s going on around campus. Since Living Groups meet together many times each day, including at breakfast and dinner, you’ll come to consider this your campus family. They’ll care for you as if you were their own.
Staff Support
Our staff’s main priority has always been one thing, and one thing only: you. Staff members, faculty, and administrators are there to help instruct and guide you through your summer experience. Our job is to (gently) nudge you beyond your comfort zone, making sure you get to experience all an EXPLO summer has to offer while feeling as safe and secure as possible in the process. And since we’re as excited to be at EXPLO as you’ll be (once you get here), we’ll make sure every experience is as fun and fulfilling as can be.
The dormitory supervision is extremely comprehensive. In addition to residential advisors, each living group has two residence directors, with six residence directors at the program in all. Residence directors are EXPLO staff members with experience working in both residential life and directly with students. Residence directors provide support and supervise students and residential advisors. Working with the residence directors are the Assistant Deans, and the Dean of Students. The Dean’s Office is generally open from 8:00am until 10:00pm each day. The Deans, the Head of Program, and all EXPLO faculty and staff live on the campus during the summer.
Roommates
We use a housing form to match students with their new roommate. Generally, there are two or three students to a room. Most students who attend EXPLO at St. Mark's arrive without knowing anyone, and, therefore, a majority of students do not request to live with a particular person. We try to honor roommate requests, as long as both students are in the same grade and both students and their parents have requested each other. We encourage friends attending the Program to seriously consider not rooming with one another so that they can get to know new people. It is possible to assign students to the same Living Group not as roommates, as long as both students are in the same grade and they both request each other.
If families have additional needs, concerns, or preferences regarding housing, they should be in contact with David Torcoletti, the Head of EXPLO at St. Mark's, before June 1.
Dorm Facilities
Dorm rooms have many different configurations and sizes. Some have carpet, some do not. Some are doubles, others triples. Each room contains a bed for each student (sometimes bunk beds), at least one dresser, and a closet or wardrobe. Each student is given two bath towels, linens, a pillow, and one blanket. Linens are exchanged weekly. Once a week, students’ personal laundry is sent to a nearby laundry service. Residential Advisors help students with both the linen exchanges and the laundry service.
Bathrooms are located right down the hall from student rooms. There are between two and four toilets, sinks, and showers in each bathroom. Students take showers either in the morning when they wake up or at night before they go to bed. In addition, there are boys’ and girls’ locker rooms near the pool so that students can also take showers after swimming.
The St. Mark’s School custodial department cleans bathrooms and common areas daily. Students are expected to keep their rooms tidy and residential advisors conduct regular room inspections to make sure student rooms are reasonably well-cleaned and organized.
Telephone Calls
We do not allow students to call home the first week of the program, except in the case of an emergency. Our experience has shown that students need to develop a support system for themselves at the program and that calling home during the first week often makes the transition away from home more difficult. Parents are encouraged, of course, to contact the Program at any point during the summer to learn how their children are doing. We cannot call a child to the phone, but if parents would like to call and leave a message for a child, the message will be delivered with the daily mail.
New Friends, New Experiences
Every day at EXPLO, you’ll be experiencing something new — including meeting all the new people around you. With students from all over the world living just down the hall (and in your courses, workshops, and activities), you’ll have a chance to get to know people with customs, beliefs, and views that might be really different from your own. But the most time you spend getting to know them? You’ll find you’re not so different after all.
