I remember the day well; around lunchtime in Mac, groups of friends and roommates clustered around laptops, waiting to hear their fate via an email from BC ResLife. I hovered over my roommate’s MacBook Pro with about ten others. She refreshed her inbox every thirty seconds, waiting, waiting, waiting. Somewhere near the now non-existent Chocolate Bar, a group of girls began squealing, “WE GOT A PICK TIME! WE GOT A PICK TIME!” After frantically glancing at the others surrounding us, we glared at the inbox open on our table, and hit refresh.
There it was: my very own email from ResLife, telling me that I was one of the chosen ones. I belonged to one of the small groups of people who had been granted a pick time on the first day of the housing lottery. I hate to admit that I started squealing as well- and jumping, and hugging, and crying. Well, not crying…but almost. After stressing for weeks about what I would do if I was condemned to CoRo (“I’ll transfer. I’ll do it, don’t tell me I won’t. I’ll go to Georgetown. Heck, I’ll go to BU if I have to live in fricking Roncalli.”), I was able to breathe a sigh of relief and drown momentarily in the delight of accessing 8-man Nirvana.
I’m not going to lie to you; living in Walsh has its perks. I’m close to the Mods, to Lower, and to off campus parties. I get to laugh at my friends who live in Williams when they have to trudge through snow to their doubles at the end of the night while I get to recline on the couch in my common room. Like most things in life, however, there are good and bad things entwined in my 8-man experience. For you who are threatening to transfer if you get “stuck on CoRo”, worry not. 8-man life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and here are a few reasons why.
1. Noise
8-mans are loud. This is equally true on Friday nights at 11 PM and Tuesday mornings at 3 AM. You can hear everything going on across the hall and on the other side of your bedroom wall. Everything. Forget trying to get work done in your room; it’s next to impossible to focus with music blaring upstairs, girls screaming across the hall, and your roommates laughing in the common room in the wee hours of the morning. Furthermore, on a more delicate note, there’s something to be said for communal bathrooms. With the powder room so close to everyone else, there’s no privacy, if you know what I mean.
2. Privacy
Speaking of privacy, there’s none to be found on lower campus. Living with seven roommates can be exhausting, especially when there’s never any possibility of alone time. At virtually all hours of the day or night, someone will be at home to intercept you when all you friggin’ want is to lay in bed and watch fifteen episodes of Revenge. Either they’ll want to hang out together (please no, leave me alone), or they’ll ask to watch your program of choice with you (even worse). Hooking up can also be a nightmare; texting one roommate for “use” of the room is easier than ensuring privacy when there are seven.
3. Cleanliness
Not only are 8-mans harder to clean (kitchenettes and bathrooms get really gross, really fast), but it’s more difficult to convince everyone to do their fair share. I can almost guarantee that one or two girls will refuse to put in time scrubbing dishes or vacuuming the carpet, which can be a major catalyst for roommate conflict and awkwardness. Cleaning schedules are all well and good, but if it’s not your turn to take out the trash, what’s stopping you from throwing week-old sushi into the common room garbage? Like, ish.
4. Proximity to class.
Say you live in Welch. Say you schedule all your classes in Stokes. Say, consequently, your life is the easiest thing ever. You can literally see your classroom from your bedroom window, you can leave seven minutes before class starts and still have time to grab a latte at the Chocolate Bar, and, finally, you can laugh at the suckers fresh from the million dollar stairs, gasping and red-faced, who have just trekked twenty minutes through the biting cold to reach their 10 AM class. On another note, not having to take the million dollar stairs to class should be its own number. Those things suck. If you live in an 8-man, to get to class, you have to sludge through the mods, past Hillside, up the stairs, and through the quad. It takes at least 12 minutes and is super inconvenient.
I am not assuming that this article will dissuade you from trying to get a suite on lower campus when housing time rolls around. What I do hope, however, is that if you don’t get an 8-, 9-, 7-, 6-, or 4-man (apparently those all exist), you’ll realize that every situation has a silver lining, and the above-mentioned things are it. Those who get a spot on Lower may be initially considered the lucky ones, but don’t forget the curse of the 8-Man. It’s a very real thing.
Photo Credits:
http://media-cache0.pinterest.com/upload/132504414006415991_u3Nu6RRK_b.jpg
http://www.mynewplace.com/blog/files/2012/08/noisy-neighbors.jpg