The Office of Residential Living will tell you to move into the dorms to live five minutes away from classes. I say, come, you might win a free Playstation 2.
How? By attending basketball games with your residential adviser and your floor “team.” With your “team,” you compete with other floors, and the floor with the most residents attending the game wins the Playstation. Our floor didn’t win, but the guys below us won, and they were nice enough to decide to share. We can go there and play whenever we want.
If that doesn’t entice you to join the residence halls community, they have a workout party on the floor below us at 11:30 every night.
That is why I moved to college, to repeat high school and trade video games.
When ORL was trying to lure us to move into the old dorms in preparation for the Olympics, they claimed there was more of a sense of community in the old halls. I thought it was an advertising scam, but soon after moving I realized it wasn’t. With a communal bathroom and a heater that sounds like it will blow up every night, students have no choice but to establish a community. What would we do without bonding over mutual disgust over shower slime, bathroom talks and throwing slippers at the hall heater?
Not all the sense of community comes from being negative, however. Some is therapeutic, like late-night toothbrush talks. The girl that lives down the hall might?under the influence of sleep deprivation and other stuff?volunteer details on how guys have traumatized her throughout her life.
After I know her life story, she has a choice to risk rumors spreading or to simply be nice to me the next day. The same goes for my neighbor. I can hear practically everything that happens in her room, including the dial tone when she connects to the Internet.
If you talk to a lot of people about dorm food, they will complain about how the pancakes aren’t mom’s extra sweet ones. I would complain, but whenever I have walked into a college student’s apartment around dinner time, I was offered Ramen by default. Or if a girl lived there, I had a choice of diet crackers as well.
We do have a wide selection of foods at the Gold Medal Cafe: pizza, fries, cheeseburgers and a greased entree. All of those, along with a selection of non-grease based food are at the Crimson Underground: old spaghetti, frozen vegetables, potatoes and sometimes a very mysterious stir-fry stuck together with rice. The Ramen experiences in college apartments makes me thank Chartwells for letting me have one or two vegetable servings each day.
On the whole, living five minutes away from classes could be worth it. Also, with the dorms, you don’t have to deal with a landlord; you get to deal with another efficient and helpful U organization instead. You might feel like screaming when, after coming home from work and having a multi-page paper due the next day, somebody knocks on your door to invite you to watch a tennis match, or to throw Jell-O at the bottom floor. After two weeks, though, you will acquire the skill of knowing when to answer your door.