I'm having the exact same problem. It seems to have just started out of the blue. I'm a college student, too, and have verified that someone (although not in the same dorm as me) is not having any problems at all.

I really have no idea what the heck is going on here, but it's highly annoying.

Edit: Some additional information... the strength of the connection and whether or not I'm firewalled seem very sporadic. Sometimes I'll be at full connection strength and the next I'll be at zero. Also, I remember that I changed Java around sometime last week to work on a programming project. I'm now using Java version 1.5.0_06.