The Hassayampa Academic Village

Imagine you are searching for a new place to live. What would you search for? Perhaps the house is the main attraction. How about the Country Club benefits? Or, maybe the quality of the community is more important? Home-searching is a very intricate process and cannot be taken lightly. It takes weeks, months, even years in some cases to find the perfect house for your situation. The same applies for on-campus housing. Although sometimes a new student is assigned to a dorm based on their major or other requirements, there are still situations where a request for a specific dorm will be accepted. In those cases, prospective students should explore their options regarding where they should live. For example, questions such as: “How close are the classes? What is the community like? Are the dorms super busy at night? Where can I find food?” ought to be seriously considered. The task of committing to campus life seems tedious, and seeing all the add-ons and perks to living in Hassy may raise the question if all these are even beneficial or helpful to residents; however, through this project I wish to provide answers to some of those questions and jumpstart your decision to on-campus living.

The Hassayampa Academic Village is one of the best on-campus housing options based on its location in respect to classes, the ease of acquiring any college student’s needs and also in academics as well. Firstly, Hassy is roughly a ten minute walk to most classes and that time is cut in half when using faster transportation like a long board or bike. As the day goes on, though, there usually is a high volume of pedestrians and using a bike or board would only cause problems.

In the second point, there are a variety of food options in which students can grab a decent meal from either a meal plan or a few M&Gs. The Hassayampa Dining Hall, with hours of 7am-9pm on weekdays, offers breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as a plethora of cereals, salads, fresh fruits and vegetables, sodas and iced teas. Because it is buffet styled, students can grab as many entrees as they please with only one card swipe as they enter the cafeteria. However, a small drawback is that the servers are pretty stingy with the bacon and sausage, meaning multiple return trips are required. Nonetheless unlimited food within 100 feet of your room is always a best seller for college students.

Also conveniently located in close proximity to the Hassy Mesquite dorm is the POD (Provisions on Demand) Market which contains a Subway and many other food choices ranging from sour patch sweets to meals on the go and energy drinks of all kinds. It is safe to say students are well taken care of when focusing on both food and location, however, what does Hassy do to promote the academic aspect of college? After all, is that not the reason to attend ASU?

Within the Hassayampa building, there are two tutoring centers which usually run from 1pm-11pm on weekdays and are always free of charge. So, whenever there is a quick question on a homework problem or you simply cannot understand a concept, stop by at either the Creative Writing Center on the Second Floor or the Learning Resource Center found just past the lobby. In the Resource Center, tutoring is available in math, statistics, economics and also a number of computer/online courses and the staff is predominately Post-Graduate students that are familiar with these courses. For the most part they are very helpful, but I would not depend on them to teach you the entire course.

As a current resident to HAV, I have noticed the benefits of living fairly close to classes, having a convenience store and cafeteria right next door, and being able to go to tutoring for help pretty much whenever I need it. I feel confident that my classwork and homework will be completed on time without having too much pressure or stress because I can get help simply by walking down a few flights of stairs. Eating enough food is not a big worry since I have a few different options in very close proximity. There are only a few changes I would suggest in the surrounding services offered like the substitution option at the Dining Hall or having more counters at the P.O.D., but other than those small complaints I feel fortunate enough to be a resident at Hassy. All in all, the Hassayampa Academic Village has taken care of my basic needs as well as provided a fun community to spend time with new friends.



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Hassayampa Mesquite Building: What is it like?

Inside the HAV

The Hassayampa Buildings are widely reserved for students enrolled in the W. P. Carey School of Business which is beneficial to residents in many ways. Having commonalities in interests makes it easier to become acquainted with new people. Rooms are designed facilitate a small group of friends fairly quickly as two different rooms are joined by a single bathroom. The floors are co-ed, and therefore help broaden your circle of friends to the opposite gender even further by having an excuse to see each other in the halls or elevator or something similar (ASU Tempe Campus Tour). Early in the semester, residents are encouraged to keep their doors open if they are home, which gets rid of awkward tension from knocking on a random door and allows making friends an easy task. Sometimes meeting new people seems a bit scary and out of your comfort zone but with the help of the floor leaders tension can easily be resolved.

My roommate and I decided to decorate a little  for Halloween...

Each floor has a Community Assistant (CA) and a Peer Programmer (PP) and they serve similar purposes yet different roles. The CA’s are the “police” of the floor, as they have the authority to write you up for breaking the rules among other reasons, but they usually will give plenty of warnings before they give you the slip. They just want things to run smoothly and have as minimal problems as possible. Peer Programmers also try to keep everyone out of trouble, except they do this through planned events. Floor and building events, such as a movie night or the highly recommended Broomball at the local ice rink, originate from Peer Programmers and the Residence Hall Association. Both the Community Assistants and the Peer Programmers work to benefit the residents of their floor, as they work together to keep people out of trouble by having fun events.

Along with the friendly staff and the way the building is designed, Hassy has two lounges available to anyone who wishes to hang out at a place other than their room. Having a lounge is a huge benefit to students, because in reality, sometimes you will want to get away from your roommate and take a break. The patio offers a relaxing view of the campus and the West side of Downtown Tempe. If the time is right, you can catch the sunset reflecting off the mirrored windows of the business buildings. Now within the lounges, there is a large refrigerator, a stove, sink and garbage disposal unit, and a number of medium sized sofas. Whiteboards and markers, cork boards, and TVs are also available for use as well. As mentioned earlier, Peer Programmers will throw floor parties or ice cream socials in the lounges to encourage residents to branch out and meet each other. Along with the lounges, students can do their laundry on the fourth and sixth floors with the six washers and dryers provided. These places serve different tasks, but doing laundry and having place to relax are very valuable when living on-campus.

The lounge offers a relaxing atmosphere for students.

Hassayampa Dining Hall

Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner is Served!

Here at the Hassayampa Dinning Hall, students can fill their stomachs with just about anything you could find at a local buffet styled restaurant. Buffets are by far the most useful thing to any college student just starting out. Food can become costly, having to buy at least three meals per day, seven days per week for the whole semester will cause a decent sized hole in your pocket, and the last thing any student needs is to scramble for a job to just pay for food. With bottomless food availability within the dining hall, students are guaranteed at least one good meal per day, depending on your meal plan you can range from one to unlimited, and that one meal has the potential to fill their stomachs for a few hours; once one plate is empty, feel free to grab another burger or couple pieces of pizza (Tempe Campus Meal Plans). Perhaps a salad or wrap is more your taste? Whatever it may be, the Dining Hall will most likely have what you are looking for and knowing that is a big advantage to residents.

Students meet up right outside of the Hall to eat together.
Directly behind this photo is the entrance  to Hassy

In addition, the Dining Hall is so close in proximity to the front doors of Hassy, its residents need only take a few steps to find their meals. If the cafeteria did not exist, students would need to either go to Pitchforks or one of the other food choices over at the Student Memorial Union, a five minute walk at least. Another option would to cross Rural and find a quick meal at Burger king or chips at Circle k. However, this is not the case, and there is a cafeteria, so everyone is happy. Or are they?

The staff here at the Hassy Dining Hall is nice and effective when it comes to serving your food, but there are a few complaints about some things they do. When you want bacon, you want bacon, and two slices are not going to cut it. This goes for pizza as well. What good does it when they cut 16 small slices instead of eight or ten medium sized when the same amount is taken in both cases, whether it is two small or one medium piece? The answer is quantity control. The cooks want to make sure they have enough food to feed the huge number of students that show up to eat, running out would be a big letdown. However, I have seen people and I have done it too, who will get a plate with pancakes, sausage, eggs, and bacon, sit down and eat it, and then jump right back in line and ask for just sausage and bacon again. Why should we have to make multiple trips if the hall works as a buffet?

A solution to this would be having the ability to substitute, say, one sausage for one bacon. In this example, you could hypothetically have two of each, one sausage and three bacon, no sausage and four bacon or vice versa. That way, you could give up your sausage for more bacon, leaving more sausage in the bin for the next person to choose and theoretically there would be just as much bacon and sausage in those bins as there would be if we had gone back for seconds. A second solution would depend on the time of day. For instance, if it is a quarter to eleven o’ clock, the time lunch is usually beginning to be served, the leftover breakfast foods could be placed in a counter open to anyone to grab as much as they please. Since breakfast is over by this time, it would save the food instead of throwing it away. Pitchforks, the Dining Hall at the MU actually does this, but I have not yet seen this at the Hassy Hall, and I strongly believe it would benefit the faculty at the cafeteria by not throwing it away and the students by getting as much as they want.

Cereal is available open to close every day.

Provisions on Demand

A peek at the Memorial Union POD

In September of 2010, the Memorial Union had a new convenient store installed just down the hall from Pitchforks Dining Hall. Found in an old article of ASUnews, the purpose behind this new Safeway type marketplace was to provide “’fresh prepared foods and everyday essentials in one convenient location on campus,’ said Diahann McCarty of Sun Dining. The main goal was to ‘develop a highly-customized solution that…met the specific needs of the campus community.’” And meet the specific needs of the community it does (Sun Devil Dining).

Along with the POD at the MU, there is also another one located adjacent to the Hassy entrance which also contains a Subway restaurant. Students take advantage of the sandwich bar if the dining hall is closed, though some admit that Subway is their first and only choice when compared to the dining hall. Some people are just tired of the same things the hall offers, and the POD and Subway offer food and snack choices the Hall lacks. In the POD there is an entire section dedicated to candy; sour patch kids, sour gummies, chocolate bars, rice crispies, caramel candies and much more. Drinks are also abundant, as there is the unique 100 in 1 Drink Coca-Cola machine and a whole wall of tasty choices. It is always good to indulge after a hard day studying and a quick trip to the marketplace will leave you satisfied, but maybe not entirely.

With Subway in the background, ready to go meals on the right and chips galore in
the foreground, students definitely have a wide variety of foods to choose from.

The POD offers the essentials such as toiletries, basic medicines and cleaning supplies as well as healthy food options and not-so-healthy counterparts. The usefulness of the POD to students is unrivaled because this is the only place, to my knowledge, where you can buy toilet paper on campus. In all seriousness, though, this is also the main reason there are a couple complaints about the store. Since there are so few of these stores on campus, during the busy hours there can be roughly twenty people waiting in checkout lines with their drinks and other items. A quick fix would to re-arrange the cashiers to have space for four instead of just two, lines would come and go much faster with more lanes are available for use.

During the day the POD does not have very much traffic. As the night goes on, though, these cashiers
will be busily scanning items in attempts to keep up with the growing number of students. 

What is interesting at the POD is a medium soda is nearly two dollars and a handful of uncrustables breaks the four dollar mark. A bundle of paper towels or toilet paper is around 25% more of what you could get anywhere else off campus. In a way, the argument for higher prices is that you pay for the convenience, as the POD market at Hassy is literally right by Hassy. Students would only have to change their path only slightly to find themselves exchanging their meal plan for a small platter of chicken ceaser salad or buying a Subway sandwich (POD Market Prices). It is simple application of supply and demand, students have high demand for the products found at the POD, so the POD can inflate the price just enough to where people would still buy. Though there is no real applicable solution to this issue, creating another convenient store would help lower prices but it is not really reasonable.

Learning Resource Center

A list of tutors available at the Learning Resource Center

Arguably the most beneficial places at Hassayampa for academics are the Student Learning Resource Center and the Writing Center. Here students can stop by and receive help with their homework from upperclassmen and post graduates in a quick and painless process from 1pm-11pm on weekdays. Another really cool fact is they are located right inside the Hassy building itself! So when it is 9:45 at night and your assignment is due at 10, you can run downstairs real fast and have your question answered quickly and efficiently with hardly any hassle.

In the lobby, there is a check-in counter where you are assigned a table and tutor so there are no questions as to who your helper is and where to find them. Once inside, the tutors will do their best to show you how to do a problem or explain why your answer is wrong in a straightforward and simple explanation. An interesting characteristic of the learning center is how the tutors work on the problems. Instead of carrying around note pads or sheets of blank paper, the tables are covered in white paper cloth, so the tutor can sit down and write the problem and solution right on the table. This is very helpful to a person that is having trouble understanding the mechanics of a math problem or having difficulty deciphering an economics graph because the solution is worked out step by step right beside them. At the writing center, tutors will review your paper and answer questions directed at the strength of the thesis, supporting details and more. They try not to give you too much help actually writing the paper, though, since that would defeat the purpose of writing it yourself, but they are more than happy fixing errors and offering advice on the fluency or flow of ideas of the paper.

When I first heard about the peer tutoring center, I was a little skeptical. Sometimes having someone a year or two older may not be the best thing to help with your calc 271 homework, but take a look at the requirements the resource center holds for peer tutors. (This link will download a Word Document which shows the application requirements for being a peer tutor, I will explain which requirements I am referring to if you wish not to download the file). The Resource Center makes sure their tutors are top notch, since the Writing center requires cumulative GPA of at least 3.0 and a course GPA of 4.0 in whichever level they are tutoring at. For the Learning Center, it is a little nicer to candidates, since the overall GPA is 3.0 and the course GPA is 3.5 or higher in the tutoring areas. So do not be afraid to go to the Tutoring Center; it is free, easy, and the tutors are very nice and helpful (Tutor Application Process). Sometimes they are a little rusty with their math but they are definitely a useful resource.

Works Cited

Works Cited


"ASU Tempe Campus Tour: Hassayampa Academic Village." Arizona State University. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Nov. 2012. <http://www.asu.edu/tour/tempe/hassayampa.html>.


"P.O.D. Market Prices Vs. Off-Campus Prices | UTA NEWS." UTA NEWS | Department of Communication, The University of Texas at Arlington. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Nov. 2012. <http://utanews.com/2012/10/07/p-o-d-market-prices-vs-off-campus-prices/>.


"Sun Devil Dining opens new market in Memorial Union." ASU News, University. Arizona State University, 23 Sept. 2010. Web. 3 Nov. 2012. <asunews.asu.edu/20100923_podmarket>.


"Tempe Campus Meal Plans | Sun Devil Dining." Sun Devil Dining | Sun Devil Dining. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Nov. 2012. <http://sundevildining.asu.edu/tempe/mealplans>.


"Tutor Application Process." MyASU. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Nov. 2012. <https://students.asu.edu/trio/west/approcess>.