Penland is the hub of first-year life at Baylor. It houses more than 400 male and female residents, sits at the geographic center of campus near the Bill Daniel Student Center, and is home to the Outdoor Adventure Living-Learning Community for students who want to build community around wellness, recreation, and the outdoors. The hall was renovated as part of Baylor's decade-long residence hall modernization effort and came back with updated rooms, fully replaced community restrooms, a reflection room, a meeting room, a classroom, staff offices, and a full residential-style kitchen on the ground level. The spacious lobby with gaming and social space is also where the Campus Living & Learning offices are located, which means foot traffic, energy, and a built-in sense of being at the center of things.

Rooms are doubles and triples with community bathrooms. Every room has moveable furniture and an Extra-Long Twin bed. Penland Crossroads dining hall — described by Dining Services as the crown jewel of campus dining, with over 1,100 indoor and outdoor seats, open kitchen stations, a smoker, a fresh tortilla machine, and vegan and allergy-friendly options — is right there. If you want to be in the thick of it, close to everything, and part of a 400-person community of first-years from across the country, Penland is the pick.

Collins is Baylor's largest dedicated first-year women's hall, housing more than 450 residents across six stories. It underwent a $41.7 million renovation that was completed in Fall 2023 — meaning the current version of Collins has been open to students for just a couple of years and is about as fresh as a hall its size gets. The renovation gave it a new entrance facing Pat Neff Hall, classroom space, a faculty-in-residence apartment, and converted the old Collins Dining Hall into a fully renovated community lounge with space for studying, socializing, and exercising.

It's located on the southwest side of campus near Pat Neff Hall and Memorial Dining Hall (1845 at Memorial). The Faculty-in-Residence is Dr. Lesley McAllister, a Professor of Piano and Director of Keyboard Studies — which tells you something about the culture of the building: it's a hall with a genuine intellectual personality, not just a place to sleep before class. If you're a woman entering Baylor and want a freshly renovated, high-energy women's community with a serious social fabric, Collins is one of the stronger options in the first-year tier.

Martin is Baylor's dedicated first-year men's hall — a single-gender community for male students entering Baylor for the first time. It's been part of Baylor's renovation cycle, which means it has gone through the same program of updated rooms, bathrooms, and communal spaces that the rest of the legacy halls have received. The Faculty-in-Residence program brings a professor into the building who lives alongside residents, and the hall hosts events and programming aimed at helping men find their footing in the Baylor community during the transition year.

Martin's location puts it in the heart of the traditional Baylor campus, accessible to Moody Memorial Library and the academic core. If you're an incoming male student who wants a tight men's community where everyone around you is in the same first-year phase, Martin is the straightforward choice in that tier.

South Russell was Baylor's first legacy hall to go through the year-long renovation cycle, so it set the template for what all subsequent hall updates looked like. The renovation brought in moveable furniture (including a loft bed, desk, and chest of drawers) in all rooms, added 19 single-occupancy rooms, introduced smartphone-compatible door locks that open via app or text, and built out new quiet study spaces, community lounges, a game room, a fitness room, and a reflection room for meditation and prayer. Wi-Fi runs throughout the building, including individual rooms.

South Russell is home to male and female first-year students and sits near Moody Memorial Library — a useful location for students who plan to spend serious time in the stacks. The combination of one of Baylor's earlier renovations plus the single-room option (19 rooms where you have the space to yourself) makes it one of the more interesting options in the first-year tier for students who want a mix of community and personal space.

Texana House is one of the smaller, quieter options in the first-year tier — a women's hall that serves both first-year and upper-division students, which gives it a different feel than the large single-class halls. The mix of class years means you're living alongside juniors and seniors who have already figured out how Baylor works, which is either a comfort or a social variable depending on what you're after. It's also used as summer housing, which suggests a more stable year-round community fabric than the halls that close and empty out.

Texana is a smaller-scale option for first-year women who want something a bit more settled than the 400-person energy of Penland or Collins. The trade-off is a smaller immediate peer group in your class year.

Brooks Flats is home to the Business & Innovation Living-Learning Community, the second-most popular LLC at Baylor among incoming students. About a quarter of each incoming class at Baylor are business students, which tells you something about the demand for this hall. Students don't have to be pre-business to live here, but the community is organized around business thinking, entrepreneurship, and innovation. The signature perk is access to Entrepreneurship: Living and Learning, a class offered exclusively to B&I LLC residents that counts toward a minor in entrepreneurship — a class you cannot take from anywhere else on campus.

Brooks Flats is apartment-style housing, which puts it in a different physical category than the traditional residence halls. It's part of North Village, which stays open during winter break, making it one of the few on-campus options for students who need to be in Waco over the holidays. All class levels are welcome, so you'll live alongside sophomores, juniors, and seniors who are further along in their Baylor journey. If you're interested in business, entrepreneurship, or just want apartment-style living with a built-in peer group pointed in the same direction, Brooks Flats is one of Baylor's more distinctive residential options.

Earle Hall is part of East Village, a newer residential complex built in 2013 that also includes Teal Residential College and a dining hall. It houses approximately 350 male and female residents in the Science & Health Living-Learning Community, a professionally focused hall for pre-health students. The community emphasizes learning outside the classroom, peer support for rigorous pre-med and pre-health coursework, and shared programs for students who are all heading in the same direction academically.

East Village's setup is modern — it's one of Baylor's newer residential areas, built with faculty-student connection in mind. Living with 350 other students who are all doing the same biology problem sets and thinking about the same MCAT prep timeline is either exactly what you need or exactly what you want to avoid, depending on your study personality. If you're pre-health and want your residential life to reinforce your academic track, this is the hall built for that purpose.

Allen and Dawson are the newest renovation story at Baylor — a $44 million rebuild completed for the 2025-26 school year that took both halls down to their exterior walls and rebuilt them from scratch. The result is a two-story common area connecting the men's side (Allen) and women's side (Dawson) with shared living, cooking, and studying space. Every bedroom, bathroom, and common area is brand new. It's the most freshly renovated traditional hall option at Baylor right now by a wide margin.

Allen and Dawson are home to the LEAD (Leadership, Education, and Development) Living-Learning Community, which connects the in- and out-of-classroom experience specifically for School of Education students. The halls share a hall director, a residential chaplain, and a faculty-in-residence, all of whom live on site. The Baylor Avenue entrance has been updated. The community is intentionally structured around education students who want their peer group to reflect their academic direction. If you're going into teaching, counseling, or educational leadership, living in LEAD means your neighbors understand the coursework load in a way most campus friends won't.

Heritage House is the home of the Fine Arts Living-Learning Community, located in North Village. The LLC is open to students of any major who have a genuine passion for the arts in any form — theatre, opera, visual arts, music. The emphasis is on broadening access to art forms students may not have encountered before, and the community programs reflect that. You don't need to be an arts major to live here; you need to want to be around people who take the arts seriously.

North Village's location in the broader campus geography means Heritage House sits near Brooks Flats and other North Village housing, and stays open during winter break. If your college experience is going to be as much about what happens in the rehearsal room as what happens in the lecture hall, this is where you want to live.

North Russell is home to 390 male and female residents in the Baylor & Beyond Living-Learning Community, a hall organized around multicultural programming, global citizenship, and celebrating Baylor's traditions while preparing students for worldwide leadership. Residents come from across the country and the world, and the community explicitly builds programming around that diversity. The Faculty-in-Residence is Dr. Joe Coker, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religion, which anchors the community's reflective, outward-looking character.

North Russell was part of Baylor's renovation cycle — it went through the same year-long update program as the other legacy halls. It sits near Moody Memorial Library and offers a co-ed environment for first-year students through seniors who share an interest in community engagement, multicultural programming, and Baylor tradition.

Alexander and Memorial are the two halves of Baylor's Honors Residential College, and they just came back from a $48 million renovation completed for Fall 2024. Alexander houses the men; Memorial houses the women. Between the two buildings is the Carona Family Commons, a new connector built in the renovation that unites the halls on the upper floors with a learning center, study rooms, a gaming area, lounge spaces, and a community kitchen. On the ground level, the Carona Family Commons opens onto an outdoor courtyard and provides access to the Alexander Reading Room and 1845 at Memorial — one of Baylor students' most beloved dining halls, sitting between the two buildings.

The Honors RC is home to more than 300 honors students and is organized around the full formation of the person — academics, faith, and community. Traditions include high tea, community dinners, hall prayer, and the Memorial Chapel, which holds morning and evening prayer on weekdays. The Faculty Steward, Dr. Jason Whitt, lives on site alongside students. The hallways were redesigned to include study nooks and gathering areas, not just corridors. Alexander includes the Alexander Reading Room and a classroom where Honors courses are held. The two-year contract is the real commitment to understand here: signing up for the Honors RC means making Founders Mall your home for all of freshman and sophomore year.

Brooks Residential College is a faculty-led community open to students of all majors and classifications. Unlike the Honors RC, it doesn't require Honors College membership — anyone can apply. The community is roughly 45% first-years and 55% upper-division students, which gives it a more balanced class-year mix than the dedicated first-year halls. No minimum GPA is required. The ratio of men to women reflects Baylor's overall student body, running approximately 60/40 women to men.

Brooks RC is organized around intensive faculty-student interaction, academic development, and the traditions of Baylor community life. Common spaces in the building are open to all residents, and the two-year contract is the defining structural commitment: if you apply as a first-year student and preference Brooks RC, you're signing up to live there through sophomore year. Students who join after their first year do not carry the two-year requirement. Beds are Extra-Long Twin and height-adjustable, furniture is moveable but must remain in the room and cannot be dismantled. Shower curtains are provided. Carpeted floors, ceramic tile in bathrooms.

Teal Residential College is the STEM and nursing residential community at Baylor, housed in East Village alongside Earle Hall (Science & Health LLC) and a dining hall. The college was built in 2013 with faculty-student connection explicitly in mind, and serves engineering, computer science, and nursing students of all classifications. Pre-nursing students live here for their first two years in Waco before moving to the Louise Herrington School of Nursing campus in Dallas to complete their degree — so for nursing students specifically, Teal functions as the anchor for the Waco half of the program.

The community requires a two-year contract for first-year students and works closely with the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC) to connect residents with research and innovation opportunities. Traditions include an annual cardboard-and-duct-tape boat race across the Brazos River — each floor builds a boat and races it. That event says something about the culture: technically minded, competitive in a fun way, and genuinely community-oriented. If you are in engineering, computer science, or nursing and want your residential community to be oriented toward your academic track from day one, Teal is built for exactly that.