Living on campus for the majority of the months of the year, everyone should consider their dorm room their “home away from home,” no matter how much we may complain about the living conditions. Granted, some of the buildings may be experiencing some issues at the moment and others have conditions that are less than stellar, but it is home for a little bit longer nevertheless.
This isn’t an editorial where I will try to convince you that campus housing is the best in the country, because as we all know, that’s not the truth. I’m well aware of all of the problems with mold, vermin, and maintenance issues that arise on a daily basis. I encourage all students to report all problems to their resident assistant (RA), resident director (RD), or the health and safety and residential life committees in USGA. Lastly, I encourage complaints and suggestions to be filled out on chargervoice.com, the one website where students can have their voice heard. But like I said, this isn’t the topic of my editorial.
I would like to focus on the actual damage that students do to their own rooms and the entire residence halls, both big and small. I have noticed that students living on campus become very disrespectful of the building they live in as the course of the year progresses. Buildings are no longer treated with respect, and even less respect is shown to the residential life staff and the maintenance workers. It’s actually getting quite ridiculous.
As adults living away from home, we are expected to act as such. Would you walk around your house at home and vandalize it, treating it with disrespect? I didn’t think so. Then why do I see such behavior in our residence halls. On any given day, trash can be found abandoned in elevators, in hallways, and even thrown into water fountains. Are there really that few trash cans that we need to throw things on the floor instead? Sometimes it’s even just pure laziness. If a piece of trash falls, many people will just leave it where it fell. If at your house you walk around throwing water bottles and candy wrappers on the floor, feel free to do so here. But something tells me that that’s not the case.
Not only are residents litterbugs, they also seem to be kindergarteners who can’t help but draw on everything they can get their hands on. RAs work very hard to put on programs in the residence halls. Half the work of planning for events is creating the posters and advertising for them. Usually, within the hour the poster or advertising has been posted, someone has already defiled it with some type of writing or worst of all, obscene pictures or words. I feel as if we should all be past the age of drawing on every piece of paper we come in contact with. It’s disrespectful to the RA who made the advertisement and the amount of time they spent working on it.
Lastly, as students, we need to respect the maintenance workers that work in our buildings. We shouldn’t make more work for them then they already have to do. Along with having to do the repairs on the usual problems in each building, they spend their time cleaning up after residents who make the building disgusting. One example that comes to mind is elevators. Each and every day, the maintenance crew cleans the walls of the elevator after someone spends their time drawing on them with their fingers, making smudges, writing, and drawing offensive things. By the end of the day, the elevators need to be cleaned once again because they look terrible. The maintenance crew should not have to clean the elevator walls once or even sometimes twice a day, only to have them ruined by the end. We are not five anymore, and some people need to grow up and realize it’s truly disrespectful.
With all that being said, I want to remind everyone that no one’s residence hall is perfect. No residence hall in the country is perfect. There will always be problems and things to complain about. Remember that when there is a problem, please bring it up respectfully to whoever will best take care of it. I understand that some problems are just not acceptable at all, but being disrespectful will not help the situation be resolved any faster.
Just remember that there are people who will listen and committees in USGA whose job it is to listen when problems or issues arise. Do not be afraid to raise a complaint. We live on this campus and have the right to live in halls where everything works and conditions are safe and healthy for every resident. However, also remember that because we live on campus we have the obligation to be respectful to those who we live with, help make the buildings run, and those who try to make our residential experience an enjoyable one.
