The Pros of Dorm Living
by Ely Willard ‘20
On the last day of my summer writing workshop, the teacher invited us to write about our favorite aspect of home so that we would be excited to return the next morning. One woman was from New York City, and she wrote about her apartment building. She loves walking up the stairs, smelling her neighbors' food, and hearing snippets of conversation in various languages as she passes apartment doors. For her, being so close to other people and feeling a sense of community with them is the best thing about home.
At first, I thought I couldn’t relate to her story at all, having grown up in a house in rural Massachusetts with my closest neighbors several hundred feet away. But when I returned to Wellesley, I realized I could connect to it after all. As I make my way through my senior year, I keep getting prematurely nostalgic for this place, even though I’m still here. And one of the things I know I’ll miss, strange as it may sound, is living in a dorm.
Somewhere between sophomore and junior year, when I realized that all my friends at other schools were moving into apartments off campus, I regretted going to a college where that’s almost never an option. A part of me still regrets it, but this year, I’ve come to genuinely love my dorm and think of it as home.
I haven’t lived in the same building all four years, but I quickly gravitated toward the one I live in now and spent a lot of time in even before I was an official resident. As a first year and sophomore, I studied in the living room with friends and got advice from older students about course registration, dating, and anything else that came up. Now, I’ve become the one giving advice, and while I’m not sure if any of it is actually useful, I’m glad I can help make the community as warm and welcoming for others as it was for me.
I’m lucky that the majority of my friends happen to live in the same building and that we all found ways to stay in it year after year; that certainly colors my perception of how great it is. But part of the reason I have so many friends here, both old and new, is because the community is so strong. It’s hard not to develop friendships with people after seeing them at House Council every week or regularly studying at the same table in the living room.
The RAs and HPs I’ve had over the years also deserve a ton of praise for actively engaging with their dorm community and making common spaces fun. At the beginning of my junior year there was a big push to make the living room a place for socializing rather than just studying, and that has really paid off.
But even at the beginning of my time at Wellesley, before I knew any of my neighbors, I loved experiencing signs of people around me sharing my building. One of my favorite memories from orientation is hearing people in my hallway playing violin and ukulele while I played guitar in my room. Knowing that my neighbors were engaging in a similar hobby, even if I couldn’t see their faces, made me feel less lonely as I adjusted to college life.
Now, I still like being aware of the other people in my dorm. I love coming back at the end of the day, confident that I’ll see at least one person I know in the living room. More often than not, if I stop to say hi, I’ll get pulled into a conversation. When I’m the one hanging out in the living room, I get to see my friends come and go and chat with them as they wait for the elevator.
I love walking down my hallway and hearing bits of other people’s music filtering out through their doors. At the beginning of the year, the first years across the hall always apologized for their loud music when they saw me, but I truly didn’t mind. If I don’t like what they’re playing, I can just put my earbuds in and turn the volume up.
I love running into friends and acquaintances in the bathroom when we’re brushing our teeth and chatting about what we’ve got planned or how our day went. I love people knocking on my door to ask if they can borrow something. I love being able to walk up a couple floors to return something I borrowed from someone else and end up hanging out in their room for an hour.
Even the things I dreaded as an incoming first year don’t bother me anymore. I’ve adjusted to communal bathrooms, and although my friends don’t believe me, I really don’t mind at all that my room has been right next to the bathroom for three out of four years. The convenience of having it nearby outweighs any negative side effects.
And sure, there have been days when the stale smell of ramen in the kitchen has made me nauseous, or nights when I was sick and the people down the hall were throwing a party and I wanted nothing more than for them to be quiet. But nothing's perfect 100 percent of the time. I’ve been the person being too loud in the hallway, too, so I try to let the annoyance pass, and keep my earplugs handy.
There are some things I’ll never be happy with. (Not having an adequate kitchen, for example, has pissed me off more and more every year.) But most of the time, I’m just endlessly grateful that I get to live in a place that makes me so happy. I came into college riddled with anxiety about sharing a living space with dozens of other people, and it turned out so much better than I could have ever expected. Never again will I be able to say that the majority of my friends live under one roof. I won’t be able to just leave my room and walk downstairs when I want to socialize. I’m looking forward to having an apartment with (hopefully) more space and a working kitchen, but I’ll always remember dorm life here fondly, and I’ll make the most of it until they kick me out on May 31st.
Ely Willard ‘20 (ewillard) is a Shafer lifer in spirit if not in actuality. From the December 2019 issue.