When Gabriela Castelan was looking for an on-campus job during her freshman year, she simply applied to every listing on TCNJ’s website, without putting much thought into where she might end up.
Castelan, a junior journalism and professional writing major, was not initially alarmed when she was hired as a desk assistant, which meant sitting at the entrance to a residential building between 8:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. a couple nights a week. Her duties would include checking the picture and sticker on ever passerby’s ID to verify that they are residents of the building, signing in people who are not residents and roving the hallways three times a night – seemed simple enough.
Castalan figured she’d be placed in a nice, quiet residence hall such as Allen, where her older sister worked. She assumed her time as a desk assistant would be spent getting some extra homework done, trying not to fall asleep and making some extra money in the process.
This all changed, however, when Castelan found out she had been assigned to Wolfe Hall, one of TCNJ’s the freshmen dorms.
“The instant I found out I was DA-ing Wolfe back in my freshman year, I almost broke down and cried,” Castelan said. “I lived in Travers, so I knew exactly what was going to happen.”
What was it that she dreading so much?
“I knew about the drunk, crazy, vomiting, sex-filled lives that (some) people in the Towers live,” she said.
Castelan was not looking forward to dealing with the types of freshmen the Towers were notorious for housing, but was not in a position to refuse the job. A stipulation for her Educational Opportunity Fund scholarship required her to work on campus.
Within the first week of her position as desk assistant, she had experienced enough bizarre incidents to know working in Wolfe Hall was going to be exactly the way she had pictured it.
“It definitely lived up to every expectation I had,” Castelan said.
She recalls one particularly bizarre encounter during her first semester on the job that took place on a “typical party night.”
As Castelan was talking to a co-worker, a group of drunk kids — some in shorts and shirts, while others were shirtless — entered the building. Amongst the scantily clad group was one boy without shirts, pants or shoes. “He was only wearing boxers and socks,” Castelan said.
After successfully making it past the desk, the freshman was stopped by campus security.
“Campus security pulled him aside and scolded him for not wearing pants and told him he was very indecent for only wearing boxers,” she said.
As soon as the boy left, everyone — even campus security — laughed at him.
Since then, Castelan has seen outrageous things such as a boy in a full-body green suit who danced around the entrance to Wolfe until he was kicked out, a girl hiding in a box trying to be carried into Wolfe, a girl who was walking around with a horse-head on, a boy who never wears shoes – even in the rain, a girl wearing a Lady Gaga costume that didn’t consist of much more than a bra and panties, and more.
Instead of dreading these encounters now, Castelan hopes for the most outlandish occurrences so that she can show up other desk assistants when they meet up to trade stories.
“Between DAs, we always go back and forth with stories,” she said. “It’s great.”
Castelan has come a long way from her first semester sophomore year, when she despised the drunk freshmen who would stumble into Wolfe Hall at 1:00 a.m. after a night of partying.
“I choose to work on the party nights now, because it makes working so much more entertaining,” she said.
Castelan no longer considers trying to find a new on-campus job. “I’ll be there until I graduate,” she said.
She finds a true sense of enjoyment and amusement in her work.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I wonder, does it make me a bad person for laughing at them? And then I think, ‘nah.’”