How to find the dorm closest to your classes

The hall you pick decides how far you walk every single day. Two halls that look the same on a housing site can be ten minutes apart from the buildings you actually have class in: there and back five days a week, that’s 100 minutes. Hall Finder works it out from your own schedule: add your classes, and it ranks your school’s halls by how long you’d walk each week, with the real walking routes on a map.

What Hall Finder does

You tell it where you need to be and on which days. It works out the walk from every residence hall to each of those places, adds up the week, and puts the halls in order, shortest week first. Then you can plan the room in the hall you pick, straight from the results.

It works today at Arizona State, Columbia University, Penn State, UCLA and University of Florida. Open Hall Finder and choose your school.

Add your classes

• Upload your schedule. A calendar file (.ics) from your school portal, Google Calendar or Apple Calendar is read right in your browser and never uploaded. A screenshot or PDF of your schedule works too once you have a free account: we read the class names, days, times and rooms, then show you what we found so you can check it.
• Or add buildings by hand. Search by name or by the short code on your schedule, like WILLARD or OSM, and tap the days you go: M, T, W, Th, F.
• Add the rest of your week. Quick adds find a library, gym or dining hall to add, and you can drop a pin anywhere else you go often, like a job or a practice field.
• Narrow it down. Only show halls with AC, singles or doubles, or first-year halls where the school says which halls are for first-years.

Nothing from a screenshot is added on a guess. Every class shows the room text we read and the building it matched; anything we weren’t sure about asks you first.

How the minutes are counted

Walks follow real paths and sidewalks from OpenStreetMap, door to door, at an average walking pace of about 3 mph. A week’s walk is, for each place, the days you go times the one-way walk times two. It doesn’t count buses, waiting at crossings or the order of your classes, so treat it as a fair way to compare halls rather than a stopwatch. The details are on how we measure.

What you get, free and with Plus

Adding places is open to everyone. Seeing results takes a free account, and everything you entered is kept through signing in.

• Free account: your #1 hall, its weekly walk, the minutes to each of your places, and one walking route on the map.
• Plus ($4.99 once) and Pro ($14.99 once): every hall ranked, every route, two halls compared side by side, and setups you can save and share with a link. Plus also includes 3 plan credits; see pricing for the rest.
• Pro: also compares halls with your roommates in My Room (below).

Already looking at a hall?

Hall pages at these schools show the walk from the front door to the nearest dining hall, library and gym, where the campus data has them, with a map. That part is free and doesn’t need an account. From there, “Got your class schedule?” opens Hall Finder with that hall ready to compare against your best match.

Choosing with roommates

Picking a hall with friends? Open a shared room in My Room. Its Halls view lets each of you add your own classes, the same way as in Hall Finder, and ranks the halls for everyone two ways:

• Least walking together: the hall where your weeks add up to the fewest minutes.
• Fairest split: the hall where whoever walks the most walks the least, so one person doesn’t get the long walk every day.

Each hall shows everyone’s week side by side, and picking one draws each person’s routes on the map in their colour. Roommates see each other’s buildings and days, not course names or where a pin was dropped. It works in a room hosted on Pro; roommates don’t need Pro to join.

Use it to rank, then plan

1. Add your classes and the places you go every week.
2. Rank the halls and look at the top few, not just the first.
3. Weigh the walk against what else matters: AC, room size, your friends.
4. Put your choices in order on your housing application.
5. Once you know your hall, plan the room. The finder links straight into the room planner with that hall picked.

Where the data comes from

Walking routes use data from OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), and the map is served by OpenFreeMap. Building names and codes come from each school’s registrar or housing office. Each school’s Hall Finder page lists its sources and the date its walking data was last built.