The Story
Freshman Halls: Not as Bad as You'd Think
When I hear someone say "college dorms," my reflexive thoughts are not entirely positive.
I would imagine that this is the case for most people. For instance, if I ask you the first word that comes to mind when I say "college dorm," I would expect something along the lines of "dirty" or "smelly" or "drunk."
I suppose I can’t say for sure, but I recommend trying it.
Based on little more than casual observation, I believe that our society has an altogether negative perception of college dormitories. After spending a year as a resident in one such dormitory, I have an idea as to why most people believe these places to be unclean or rowdy or whatnot.
Because they are.
The dormitory lifestyle is not a glamorous one by any stretch of the imagination. During my one year in on-campus housing, I was introduced to things that I once thought of as mythical.
Pizza boxes piled into a tower on a bathroom sink. A six-foot mound of trash in a two-person room. A pile of dirty clothes that doubled as a wardrobe.
I saw cockroaches that could put up a good fight against my dog, and for a couple of weeks, I slept in temperatures well above the 85 degree mark and relative humidity in the 90% range.
Twenty guys crammed into ten small rooms on a single floor. Three floors above us was exactly the same.
That was life in Fauquier Hall, one of five buildings in the Boutetourt Complex.
I spent the last eight months in the depths of Fauquier, what many would describe as the lowest rung among freshman housing options. In that time I managed to nab a summer job with the College’s Committee on Sustainability, a job that guaranteed me on-campus housing from June through August.
Back to dorm life for the summer, right?
So it seemed. But it turns out that I was in store for another introduction.
The Committee on Sustainability treats its employees well, which means that for the last few weeks I’ve been living in Jamestown Hall. When I swiped into Jamestown for the first time I didn’t think "dirty" or even "drunk." Not even close.
I thought: "This place looks like a castle."
I remember swiping my card, and hearing this loud clunk as the locks on Jamestown’s ten-foot glass doors flew open. I walked inside, into the foyer. In front of me were flights of stairs that went higher than I could see. They were paved with blue, marble flooring.
I walked up the stairs to find my room. I opened the door to find that it was literally twice the size of Fauquier 212.
The A.C. must have been cranking (although I couldn’t hear it). The temperature was in the high 60’s. The floors were immaculate, the bathroom the same.
Evidently people had already moved into most rooms on the hall, but it literally took three days for me to notice.
This place is perfect.
I was having a conversation with someone the other day about what people find attractive in buildings. This person was telling me about our tendency to find symmetrical buildings the most beautiful. We started to name a few.
“The Wren building.”
“Jamestown.”
“Not Fauquier.”
Then, a long pause.
“No. Not Fauquier at all.”
If there is one example of the antithesis of Jamestown, a polar opposite of dormitory beauty and elegance, it would be the Boutetourt Complex.
Each of the five buildings in Boutetourt is designed in a strange kind of zig-zag pattern. The complex is tucked back in a far corner of campus, basically in the woods.
There is no air conditioning. There are no spiraling staircases. There is no blue, marble flooring.
That same conversation soon turned to how I had spent the last year in Boutetourt. “So you’ve moved up in the world,” they said.
Now, I never said that.
Fauquier is old and dirty, yes. It’s not symmetrical. But putting in my time, and seeing dorm life from both sides of the fence, I can say, in all honesty, that Fauquier is my favorite building on campus.
You don’t understand what a life-changing experience living in a cramped, uncomfortable space with eighty people can be until you do it. We, the residents of Fauquier, made that building into a beautiful thing.
By the end of the year, almost every room was just as well everyone’s room. I spent most of my time somewhere other than my assigned space in room 212. And if I ever was in my room, people were there along with me.
I tend to consider myself a somewhat solitary individual, so you have to understand that this was something of a leap for me. But by my second semester, I was bounding up a flight of stairs to hang out with the girls’ floor above me every day.
Fauquier forced us, all eighty and some odd number, to live together. And it worked beautifully. We made Fauquier a real community, closer than anything I’ve ever seen in my life.
My last day in Fauquier was one of the most significant moments in my life. I remember lying on my bed at 3:00 in the morning as my roommate packed to leave later that morning.
I don’t like think of myself as a person that changes, but at that time I came to the profound realization that I was a changed person. Having lived the way that I had, stuffed in this weird building but surrounded by remarkable people, I became a better person.
One thing I’ve noticed about Jamestown is that the doors are designed to shut automatically: another nice feature of the classiest dorm on campus.
But I’d still take Fauquier any day.
Max Cunningham is Opinions Editor of the DSJ and a regular opinions contributor. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the entire staff.