Alyssa’s Loves & Loathes

LOATHE: Applying for housing
 
Every year, without fail, the process of re-applying for housing is my most stressful event in my life. Let me preface by saying I’m on a housing scholarship, in which Tulane waves the price of housing for me if I live on campus… Now let’s begin our story.
 

First semester of my freshman year, I decided to switch into a different dorm. After literally two months of talking with housing and filling out forms I was finally able to switch into a new dorm. Where did I end up? The infamous JL deep. When my new roommate and I moved in we were the first people to have lived in that room in 6 years. The closets weren’t even 20 inches wide and weren’t deep enough to put a hanger in and close the door at the same time. The room was so skinny that with my bed on one side and my roommate’s on the other, we could still reach out and touch each other’s hands while laying in bed. In addition, we shared a wall (my side of the room might I add) with the “haunted” room. You all know the one – it has the old timey keyhole you can look through and see nothing but an empty room with a rocking chair in he middle, that is – if you are brave enough to stick your eye up to the hole, a feat that took me nearly two months.
 
After that debacle we were determined to get a good place to live the next year, the only problem with that was by the time we were allowed to log into housing, the only available rooms were in Modular Housing. I don’t even mean that the only rooms with two spaces were there, I mean literally, the only rooms. So we then spent the next year finding cockroaches in our beds, shower, sink, shoes, on our walls and ceilings…  one even fell onto my roommate’s head. What’s more, Mods flooded in even the slightest rain, making the mile long trek from our room to Gibson even more unbearable because we’ll have done a biathlon by the time we walked into class.
 
Bring on housing part three. In an ideal world, we had a perfect group of four girls we wanted in a room in Aron. We weren’t delusional though – and were planning to basically settle for whatever. Our “whatever” didn’t include two of us not getting housing at all, myself included. You’d think people on scholarship would get first dibs, or at least guaranteed a room. False. We are both in NROTC, with 4-6 year commitments to fight for our country after graduation, and we were out on our asses. The fight with housing that ensued was not a pretty one. We tried to get our scholarship moved to pay for off-campus housing, or at least housing that was somewhere in-between at a place called The Papillion. No dice. Eventually we did enough fighting that a completely empty 4-person room in Aron magically appeared and the four of us ended up together. Yay for happily ever after…
 
Except that this year housing lost our Aron retain forms – putting us back into the lottery once again. Hell no. I personally took care of the situation and made quite certain that we did, in fact, keep our room. Needless to say, I will be ecstatic to be finally done with Tulane HRL