We all had to make the decision when we first planned to go to college, and some of us continue to consider the decision at the end of every semester. Are we going to live in residence halls, or are we going to give up and get an apartment in town?
The overriding theme in most arguments for staying in the residence halls is that the Resident Hall Association will take care of you.
That is the main reason behind the mass movement from dorms to apartments every year. People don’t actually feel like they’re living in a place they can call home. Residents end up feeling like the dorm room is an extension of the classroom. You study in a dorm room. You escape from a dorm room. And you may never see the dorm room again after one semester.
One major problem with dorm rooms is that they are decorated little better than a hospital or prison cell.
You are told to live in a very small room with cold white walls and functional furniture. You do not control the temperature, you get a sink that can barely hold a couple of days’ worth of dishes, and you aren’t allowed such ‘dangerous’ things as toaster ovens and candles.
You get a tiny refrigerator that can’t even hold a pizza box. Think about how many hundreds of pizzas that have gone to waste because you just couldn’t store the leftovers.
Having pretty rooms is not only a vanity issue. It is also an issue of student psychological health. I am not proposing that residents will go crazy and try to peel off the non-existent yellow wallpaper if they live in dorm rooms.
I am suggesting that the dorm rooms are actually depressing to live in, especially when you are forced to spend a lot of time in the room studying.
A more aesthetically pleasing atmosphere would alleviate a lot of depression rates and transform a room from being homely into being a home.
I understand the precautions with some extra appliances and other fire hazards. I understand the need to save room by getting those tiny fridges. All this is perfectly reasonable.
However, I do think that it is time to spruce up the dorm rooms. I know the dorms are getting new refrigerators, starting recently with Critz Hall, but there needs to be more.
What is wrong with adding a little color on the walls, so you don’t feel like you have to cover every single square of white concrete-like wall with posters?
Why can’t the furniture be a little more stylized and actually look like something that wasn’t put together with a few spare pieces of wood in a lumber yard by a high school shop student?
Why can’t the rooms at least have curtains, or even curtain rods?
The major reason for the pure ugliness of the rooms is that it takes a lot of money to beautify them.
This problem can be solved by either raising the rent on the rooms, something that we don’t want to happen or more RHA involvement in fund-raising, a necessary evil when you want to get things done.
We don’t want the money to go to random renovations around campus. Maybe for once the university needs to put the living conditions of the resident above the renovation of another engineering building.
There is another problem with residence halls that prevents them from being a home. This deals more with the stability of long-term residence in the dorms.
While the RHA seems to encourage upperclassmen to live on campus, the practices of the RHA make this route undesirable. The problem is that most students are moved to different rooms every year, if not every semester. The resident may not even move to a different dorm or even a different floor-just a different room.
The most common excuse you could cite for the displacement is that roommates have parted ways and the RHA has to rearrange people within a dorm.
But that doesn’t explain when two people are put in a new room. Surely one of them could retain the old room.
But that’s not how it happens. To the untrained eye, it seems like the people placing residents into rooms just divide the names up by hall and gender and put people in rooms by chance.
This may not seem like a major problem. So a resident is haphazardly moved across the hall, even if he or she never asked for the room change and two different people are living in the old room. So what? That’s not so bad, is it?
Yes, it is bad. It merely shows the RHA does not consider the room that they have rented to you as your home. They may tout a good living atmosphere and the ultimate college experience, but their actions say otherwise.
A simple reworking of the organizational methods of assigning rooms would solve this problem. It doesn’t even cost anything. It merely takes a little time and regard.
I once heard a student say that on her tour of the dorms, she was told that the university doesn’t expect students to stay in the dorms after their sophomore year. The RHA continues to send that message to the residents through continual subtle disregard.
Don’t get me wrong. The RHA does many thing to take care of residents. If you have a bad roommate, they’ll reassign you. They bill your student account with a flat fee for rent, along with all the conveniences, so there are no surprises in billing. Maintenance is fairly good about fixing whatever is wrong in your room, and if they don’t, you can complain to the university instead of duking it out with your landlord.
Plus, the RHA provides droves of resident directors and resident assistants to take care of any problem, no matter how personal. It’s like having a whole bunch of big brothers and sisters without all the fighting.
Even if you have a whole bunch of siblings running around, and maybe the chance “mom and dad” figure, residence halls fall short of one thing: being a home.
There is a problem when a student has lived in five to six rooms within the same dorm by his or her junior year. There is a problem when dorm rooms are first described as clinical and functional. There is a problem when these RD’s and RA’s have to take care of cases of depression that the state of the dorms only encourage.
And these are problems that need to be solved if the university wishes to continually claim to focus on the students.
Angela Adair is a junior English major. She can be reached at [email protected].