I am among the droves of students who live off campus.
Make no mistake, living on campus has its advantages.
For the most part, dorms are cheaper, closer to class and more community-oriented than apartments.
Why, then, do so many Mississippi State students choose to live off campus? Despite the conveniences of on-campus living, issues with dorm life drive students off-campus.
While the dorms are steadily being refurbished and improved, several of them still aren’t up to par quality-wise.
Hightower Hall, for instance, has a distinct “ambience” that leaves its residents smelling as if they were wearing “eu de mildew.”
Rice Hall has an elevator that stops on every other floor. If you live on the seventh floor, the two extra stops can be frustrating.
Even the largest dorm rooms get crowded quickly. Invite friends over to watch movies or study for chemistry, and you’ll find the room too packed to move after about the fifth guest.
It’s nice to be able to go to the bathroom without walking across a human carpet.
Mix in a few years of gathered stuff, and one can barely fit two people in a dorm room.
In addition to small rooms, dorms also fall short on other necessary resources, like kitchens and laundry facilities.
Laundry requires more time and work when you have to share four washers with a hundred other people and have to travel three to five floors to get from the washers to your room.
Kitchen facilities are usually a little better distributed, but having to fight for the oven makes fast food far more appetizing.
This offsets the dorms’ low cost advantage.
Dorm rooms also lack sufficient electric power. The handful of outlets is hardly sufficient to supply the fridge, microwave, computers, hair dryers, televisions, stereos, game systems, VCRs, DVD players, lights and fans typical of a dorm room.
Even power strips don’t alleviate this problem. During my sophomore year in Hull Hall, the warm months were punctuated by the occasional floor-wide power outage brought about by the air conditioning and the shear number of electronics-mostly computers-on at an given time.
An apartment is a home. Most apartments have their own washers, dryers and kitchen suites. There’s plenty of room for guests, stuff and electronics.
Whereas dorms kick their residents out every nine months, forcing residents to move, even if only to another dorm room-apartments allow students to live year-round.
However, the odd smells, shared appliances and small rooms are all minor inconveniences compared to the biggest frustration in dorm life-the ludicrous rules.
Imagine two best friends. They know each other’s habits, trust each other and plan on rooming together in college.
However, they can’t because of state and university policy preventing different sexes from sharing a floor, much less a room.
Their solution is simple and easy-get an off-campus apartment.
The rules go further than just preventing co-ed dorm rooms. For instance, the visitation policy is enforced to be sexually discriminatory.
Take Rice Hall: A girl with female visitors is fine anytime. If she has a male friend over, she must escort him up and down the elevator, but not the stairs.
I guess boys and stairs just don’t mix.
Also, guys must be out of the dorm between the hours of 2 a.m. and 10 a.m. One of my current roommates was banned from Rice Hall for being five minutes late for check-out.
Not surprisingly, he lives off campus.
Overall, the rules of dorm life are frustrating and date back to days when men and women did not mix unless it was a date. There’s no reason why students should be prevented from spending the night with a friend of the opposite sex.
The no-alcohol policy is equally stupid. Like the visitation rules, they assume that the students are not adults, incapable of rationally judging their own actions.
Any law-abiding student who wants to drink in his or her residence only has the option of moving off campus. Otherwise he or she would have to go to a bar.
Clearly, anyone wishing to live in the dorms should first consider the potentially poor living conditions and the inane rules that treat college students as children.
And if you’re still not convinced that life is better off campus, remember one thing: In my apartment, I control the air conditioner.
Nathan Alday is a senior aerospace engineering major. He can be reached at [email protected].