Apartments

You won’t hear us call them dorms.

Dynamy students live in Victorian-era buildings that have been renovated into apartments.  This provides students with the opportunity to live and learn in a true neighborhood near the city’s vibrant center.

Conveniently, our three apartment buildings are located within a block and a half of each other and the Dynamy office building. They are situated in a neighborhood that has been designated a historic district. Apartments are located close to Elm Park and housing for 3 area colleges, which makes for a nice mix of well-kept properties, families, and college students.

While students are at Dynamy they develop, or improve, independent living skills with the support of advisors and residential coordinators, who have their own apartments on the property.  Residential coordinators help students strengthen independent living skills like budgeting, cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. Also,  residential coordinators run weekly house meetings and organize regular residential life activities. As a result, this helps students balance work and responsibility with fun and socialization. These events may include on-site activities such as ping pong tournaments and movie nights or off-site activities such as hikes and games of paintball.

After graduating, students often say that they learned as much from apartment living as they learned from their internship. On top of that, they mention having stronger independent living skills than their peers in college dorms or apartments with roommates, even if it took them some time to refine their skills while they were at Dynamy.

Living Expenses:

Dynamy Internship Year does not have a cafeteria or a mess hall but each individual apartment is equipped with a full kitchen therefore students are responsible for their own meals. In an effort to help with meal prep and budgeting Dynamy offers an optional stipend plan for families to opt into. The stipend plan insures the payment of a uniform living allowance to all participating in-terns each week. It covers common living expenses such as weekly groceries, entertainment, and basic travel to and from work; the weekly stipend is currently set at $150. We are convinced that $150 per week can provide a comfortable standard of living as long as one is willing to accept the challenge of watching unnecessary expenses, following a budget, and buying cooperatively with apartment-mates.

Housing Breakdown:

Each of our houses have 3 intern apart­ments, with 2-6 interns per apartment, and one Residential Coordina­tor apartment. All apartments have basic furnishings—refrigerator, range, kitchen table, chairs, sofa and coffee table, dressers, and standard twin beds.  Houses can be coed with male and female floors but apartments are single sexed unless a student opts into gender inclusive housing.

Gender Inclusive Housing Option:

Dynamy’s Gender Inclusive Housing option reflects our commitment to gender equality and to fostering an inclusive living and learning environment for all students. Gender Inclusive Housing allows students, in mutual agreement, to share a multiple occupancy apartment, regardless of the students’ sex or gender. This option is open to ALL students and also provides housing options to students who may identify as transgender, genderqueer, non-binary, are questioning their gender identity or do not wish to prescribe to gender classifications.

While more information will be provided to you as student once you have officially enrolled in the program, the transparency in this process is important. While apartments at Dynamy can be comprised of those across the gender spectrum, customarily we assign students designated the same sex at birth as direct roommates in bedrooms within those apartments. Please reach out if you would like to talk further about housing options, so that we can continue to keep an open line of communication with you as a Dynamy enrolled student.