It can be hard to make college feel like home, even after you’ve made good friends and discovered great new restaurants, but why? Because your toilet isn’t there.

If you’re a freshman sharing a bathroom with your whole floor, finding a new toilet as comfortable as the ones at home can be trickier than anything college throws your way. But don’t fear, Marquette has dozens of porcelain thrones waiting for you to make them yours.

For this definitive guide to Marquette’s best, worst and most memorable restrooms, bathrooms will be graded on a scale of one to five toilets. The grades will be based on a number of qualitative categories: cleanliness, privacy, comfort, traffic and modernity. It’s not a mathematical formula, but when it comes to grading restrooms these are the things that really matter.

The restrooms in the Raynor side of the library are solid, generally clean restrooms, but the first and second floors have too much foot traffic to be among Marquette’s elite bathrooms. But go to the basement and the story changes. Not only is the basement bathroom twice the size, it gets less than half as much traffic as its upstairs counterparts. The men’s room is essentially two whole rooms. The largest stall in the far-left corner of the restroom is probably the single greatest toilet on Marquette’s campus.

5 toilets

Johnston is one of the recently renovated buildings on campus, shooting its bathrooms right to the top of the list.

They’re clean, modern and they have full body mirrors — a totally underrated perk. However, there are a number of weaknesses with Johnston’s bathrooms.

First, they’re not big. The men’s rooms only have one stall and one urinal and the women’s rooms are just two stalls. Also, they’re cold. The restrooms border the western wall of the building and there’s a window in the bathroom. In the dead of winter, sitting on a toilet in one of these restrooms is a brutal experience.

In the bowels of Johnston Hall lies perhaps the most private public restroom on campus.

Down the hall and towards the radio studio, take a left and an immediate right. There’s a brown door, often left open, that leads to a dingy old lounge used for storage. In the northwest corner of the room there’s private bathroom with just one toilet, no urinal.

If you need peace and quiet to do your business, this is the place. But be warned, this can’s flush is loud and long, which could blow your cover.

From the massive window in the women’s restroom on the third floor, one can see everything South Milwaukee has to offer. The bathroom itself is lackluster, as are all the Lalumiere bathrooms, but the window makes it stand out. There’s no better restroom on campus for staring off into Milwaukee’s puzzle of highways, pondering if the gap in work necessary to earn an A instead of a B is worth it.

Full disclosure: I’ve only been in this restroom once for approximately seven seconds with a female friend standing outside in the hallway to prevent anyone from coming in.

If you’re looking for a brand new bathroom with a minuscule amount of traffic and a stall that also has a shower for some reason, then this is the bathroom for you. It’s an upscale shower and there’s a toilet two steps away in case that’s something you need.

The restroom only has one urinal, but it’s a pretty low-traffic building so that’s not much of an issue. Unfortunately, it’s not like the family bathroom in the basement of Marquette Hall  because you can’t lock it, meaning this is the most public shower on campus. It’s a neat novelty, but this shower just isn’t practical.

The bathrooms in Marquette’s Wehr Chemistry, Physics and Life Sciences buildings have the worst bathrooms of any cluster of buildings on campus. It’s a fact. The nicest thing one can say is that some of them are well-lit.

If you do have to use a restroom in one of these buildings though, make sure it’s not the men’s room in the basement of Wehr Chemistry. The floor tiles are like an optical illusion and at least one of the four overhead lights is always dead. It’s straight out of a 70s thriller and good things don’t happen in bathrooms from 70s thrillers. So just try to go some”wehr” else.

When it comes to bad bathrooms, most are terrible because they totally fail in two or three of the categories evaluated here. But the first-floor restroom in Straz Business Hall is a special kind of bad – it’s not clean, it’s not private, it’s crazy busy, it’s super cramped and it’s not modern.

Small children complain about how tiny the stalls are. New Yorkers note about how busy it is.  Don’t go there. Just don’t.