Shepard Facilities
Shepard floor plans: First Floor Second Floor Third Floor Fourth Floor
(pink is the ladies; blue is the gentlemen)
Piano Lounge
When you walk into the main entrance of Shepard, you may hear some beautiful melodies coming from your left. No, you’re not hallucinating. You’re probably hearing one of Shepard’s finest making beautiful music on the baby grand located in the aptly named Piano Lounge. A generally large and pretty room, the piano lounge is also home to firesides, meetings for many student groups, and the quarterly Coffeehouse, where our talented residents show off for the rest of us.
Classroom
If you’re a Northwestern student, there’s no way around it: academics are pretty important. And Shepard has you covered, having its very own classroom. The whiteboards seem to be perpetually covered with meeting plans or math problems, as people use the classroom for club meetings, study sessions, and actual Shepard-only classes (for academic credit, covering topics like Bioethics) each quarter. That’s right. If you live in Shepard, you could wake up a minute before class, walk downstairs and show up in bunny slippers.
TV Lounge
Football games, basketball championships, and the weekly episode of Grey’s Anatomy. The TV lounge is good for a lot of things, since it sports a huge widescreen television and tons of couches. However, you can have fun in the TV lounge without staring at a screen; there are ping-pong, pool, and foosball tables for your enjoyment. Munchies are held here every week, as well as occasional firesides, performances, and group meetings.
Study Lounge
Have a loud roommate or want free wireless? Go no further than the Shep basement and sit down at one of the desks in the Study Lounge. This room is known to be really quiet at all times, so still that the automatic motion sensor doesn’t pick anything up for a while, and the lights subsequently turn off after a while. After a few seconds, someone stands up, waves his arms, and the lights turn back on. That’s how hardcore the study lounge is. But nothing’s better than a silent space without any distractions when you have two finals the next morning. And that’s what the Study Lounge can offer.
Practice Rooms
If you’re a music major, a theatre major, a dance major, or just enjoy performing and need somewhere to practice, there is no better place to live than Shepard. Why? Because you don’t need to wake up your entire floor if you’re inclined to play tuba at four in the morning. You can just go down to the basement and make use of one of our practice rooms. Each practice room has a piano, and one has a ballet barre and a mirror for Sheep of the dancing persuasion.
Kitchen
Like to cook? Want to raise money for Dance Marathon by selling cookies or brownies? Bake food for the rest of us in the Shepard Kitchen. We certainly have the amenities for you. We have an industrial size refrigerator and freezer, two microwaves, an oven, a stove, and a huge sink. We also have a pantry where there are bowls and utensils for shared use.
Laundry Room
This is where you clean your clothes. That’s pretty much it. A wash costs $1, as does a dryer cycle. This is pretty standard in every dorm. You can use quarters to pay for this, or load up your WildCard with cash in the machine located in the lobby, then simply use the card to pay for laundry. What’s cool about the laundry room is that it’s located in the basement, right next to the kitchen and the practice rooms. So while you’re folding your T-shirts, you can listen to someone playing the saxophone and smell the yummy stuff the social chairs are cooking up for munchies later.
Exec Office
This is the second home for the Shepard President and Vice President. It features lots of stuff the Exec Board needs, and also has a gigantic test file. If you turn in old tests, you get housing points, and your friends who have the same class later can borrow said tests to help them study. It’s a pretty good deal. The Exec Office also sports a pretty cool mural on one wall.
Game Room
The Game Room is kind of an unsung hero in terms of Shepard facilities. I mean, there’s a working air hockey table there! Also, there’s a television and Dance Dance Revolution pads, and since the DDR game in Norris broke, this is your alternative. Also, there are couches, which make the game room a really fun place to hang out with friends if you’re too lazy to climb the stairs back to your floor.
Master’s Office
This is the place where the Master of Shepard, engineering professor Randy Freeman, gets his Shepard work done. If you see him in there, stop by and say hello! Professor Freeman also frequently joins us for lunch in the Shepard Dining Room located in Allison Hall. He’s a pretty cool guy.