As a Northeastern girl, I’ve gotten many strange looks and jokes about attending a Midwestern school. A small one in the middle of nowhere-Ohio, at that. There are many times that the emptiness and inaccessibility have discouraged me, but I have learned to find comfort in the private, easy-going environment of Granville, Ohio. Especially after visiting a city school.
A couple of weeks ago I traveled back home to visit my parents in New Jersey and then travel into New York City for a friend’s birthday. After stepping off of the train from Grand Central and stopping immediately at his school, I was in culture shock. The dorm buildings were gated with a guard sitting outside the dorm building checking people in. The entrance closer to his dorm building has a revolving door opening at the touch of his ID card, only able to let one person in at the moment. I was surprised by the height of security but it didn’t end there. Once we got into the building, an RA was sitting at the front desk making sure everyone swiped in again.
To anyone reading this from a city school, this may sound completely ordinary. But this level of security is nothing like what we experience at Denison University. All you have to do to get into a dorm building at Denison is a simple ID swipe at the door. Sometimes not even that if someone is nice enough to open the door for you. It’s all so easy.
But then again, it’s about context. There is going to be more security for a school in the middle of the Bronx than a school on top of a hill in a rural, quiet town. We at Denison always complain about being in the middle of nowhere, I can appreciate the conveniences of being on a residential campus where I know the only people I am going to encounter are students. I never have any worries about security within my building and I can walk from one side of campus to the other like I’m walking through my own backyard. Once we get to college, sometimes we get into a routine of being stuck in our own college bubble. But when I stepped out of the bubble that weekend I grew to understand all the different lives people live at different universities and have grown to love my little home on the hill.