Dear Office of Residential Life, This year, I was fortunate enough to move into Pasquerilla East Hall. I was assigned a quad and eagerly looked on the website to find specifications of my new home, as well as a packing list. I was warned that the quad closets were small, so I packed as lightly as a teenage girl can reasonably be expected to do. I was filled with excitement to meet the young women I’d be living with and see my dorm.Fortunately, Pasquerilla East was renovated in the summer of 2016. The renovations included fresh paint and new furniture. When I moved into my assigned quad at the start of this year, I encountered this new furniture first hand. That is, I could not open my door because the furniture was filling too much of the room. I had to push my door open (in conjunction with my parents and two lovely members of the Welcome Weekend team) by forcing the pieces of furniture to topple onto each other, instead of standing upright. The reason for this unexpectedly aggressive move in? The new modular furniture does not all fit into a quad if it is not lofted. After moving enough of the furniture into the hallway to have space to loft my bed (sorry neighbors), I wheeled my luggage into the room and began to unpack. The first task was making the bed. It was then I discovered my biggest gripe with the new furniture: I cannot sit up in bed. After nearly an hour of shimmying the fitted sheet on, I had whacked my head on the ceiling enough to raise the concern that I was concussed from making my bed. Frustrated by the unending task of making my bed in a space reminiscent of an undersized coffin, I moved to unpack my clothes. Though the closet was small, I was relieved to find a reasonable height under the bed ... until I stood up fully and realized that I could neither stand underneath my fully lofted bed nor sit up on top of it. The height of the space underneath the bed is incredibly annoying, not only because I cannot stand up, but also because sacrificing a foot on the desk and wardrobe would have prevented me from doing more army crawls getting into and out of bed than all of ROTC. I want to be clear: I have adored living in a quad. I have fantastic roommates and thoroughly enjoy the drop-in atmosphere we have cultivated in our common room. However, I have two requests to the Office of Residential Life. First, the next time a dorm gets new furniture, please order samples. The poor ratio of under-to-over bed height is immediately obvious upon seeing the furniture in the dorm. Samples would have allowed first-hand interaction instead of a solely measurements based assessment without truly experiencing the furniture. Second, I am cordially inviting you to help me make my bed. I have shimmied, struggled, solicited advice, enlisted friends and taken the mattress off of the bed frame to put on the fitted sheet. If there’s a better way to do this, I would love to know. If not, hopefully with 10 of us, it will take less than two hours.
In anticipation of fresh sheets,
Megan O’Gorman
freshman
March 6
