I’m messy. Perhaps messier than anyone you know. Somehow I lack the gene that makes people throw clothes into hampers, preferring to let them fall to the floor wherever I might be standing. Some have accused me of being a hoarder, but that’s because they’ve never witnessed me cleaning up, a process that involves throwing out or giving away anything I can’t find a spot for. Now that I’m off campus, this is not such a big deal. I have a bigger space to work with, so clothing does not accumulate into a Himalayan peak as quickly. I also do not need to adhere to a roommate’s sleep schedule and can therefore come home in the wee hours and move a pair of pants to the hamper from, say, the kitchen floor.
By the end of freshman year, my suitemates pretty much wanted to kill me since I had a suitcase full of crap as a permanent fixture in the lounge. It was easier to pull something to wear out of there if my roommate was asleep. In the end, we all had an unspoken agreement that I would be a shameless slob and they could use my stuff without asking. All this in mind, I can’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for the students who needed to move from their rooms in the Freshman Quad at the last minute last week.
Due to the ongoing construction of a bridge between Hinman-Lincoln and Elder, students living in both dorms had to move, either to vacant rooms or to set-ups in the lounges. They were given about a week to move and had to relocate at the peak of midterms. We don’t know exactly how many students had to move, since we were unable to reach the Housing Operations and University Residential Life offices for comment Thursday. Students said they wished they had been given more notice.
Things come up and the University reserves the right to ask students to move if the situation necessitates it. Sometimes less-than-ideal circumstances mean unavoidable inconveniences, but this situation reflects either inconsideration or poor planning on the University’s part. Either people knew this was going to happen before the students were notified, or we jumped into this new project without properly understanding its potential effects on the NU community.
NU students have been dealing with the pressure of high academic demands and packed extracurricular schedules for their entire lives. These stressors are not new when they come to campus as freshmen. Instead, it is the added task of having to organize their lives, having to find some time to clean their rooms and do their laundry and generally manage the chaos, that makes college a formidable challenge. It’s something I’m still struggling to master. I will just as proudly call my mom when I manage to find time and energy to vacuum as I will when I get an ‘A’ on a paper.
The University needs to recognize what a burden they place on students when asking them to relocate, particularly at such a stressful time of the quarter. In planning this construction project, NU should have given notice to the affected students weeks in advance or waited until the summer for this phase of the project.
I hope students were notified as late as they were because of a lack of organization as opposed to a desire to keep this inconvenience quiet until it was too late to complain.
Campus Editor Ali Elkin is a Medill sophomore. She can be reached at [email protected].
