Here I am circa 2000 in my Pearce dorm room with my first roommate (courtesy of Tech's sophisticated potluck system), Diane. She lasted two whole quarters at Tech!On-campus life has come a long way since my days as a Louisiana Tech student.
I recently helped a family member move into a University Park apartment, and I was struck by the quality of the new housing facilities. For a moment I wondered what campus I was on.
It’s been about a decade since I loaded down my Honda Prelude with dorm room essentials and headed west on Interstate 20, destination: Tech. Student housing here in Ruston has advanced by leaps and bounds since then.
As a high school student, I got a preview of dorm life the summer between my junior and senior years when I enrolled in a class at Tech. For three weeks, my best friend and I traded our real life as Monroe teenagers for the freedom that comes with being college students. We moved into Kidd (remember good old Kidd? It’s now a parking lot) and stocked up on junk food, wielding our Tech Express cards and trying desperately to look like we belonged on a college campus.
Back then, dorm rooms didn’t have Internet connections. Heck, they didn’t even have thermostats. Every year that I lived on campus, my roommates and I would suffocate in the winter and freeze in the summer because the temperature of the entire dorm was managed by one master switch located somewhere across campus. I don’t know if there was ever a time when that particular arrangement made sense, even back in the ’60s, when many of the buildings were built.
I lived in the dorm for three of my four years at Tech. In my senior year, when I finally moved off-campus, I asked myself why in the world I’d waited so long. Now, though, for students lucky enough to live in University Park, there’s no real difference between living in university housing and living off-campus.
During those three years of dorm life, I had three different roommates and lived in three different dorms: Pearce, Kidd and Aswell. Each one had its own set of amenities and inconveniences.
There was one problem that plagued me from dorm to dorm through the years: ants. Even during my three-week stint as a faux college student I battled the dorm ants. They were back when I returned as a full-fledged freshman and were the reason I lobbied the housing office to get a dorm re-assignment (finding ants making trails through your underwear drawer would send you over the edge, too).
But alas, there they were again at the new dorm, and no amount of complaint calls from either myself or my parents seemed to get the problem solved. Eventually, I just made a habit of buying a can of bug spray every time I went to Wal-Mart (which was frequently back then, i.e. every other night). By the time I finally moved off campus, I was a pretty good shot. This skill also came in handy during The Great Cricket Invasion of 1999. I remember walking across a cricket-laden Centennial Plaza one day that year, relishing each step as I crunched crickets beneath my feet.
On-campus pests aside, life in the dorm wasn’t all bad. I met some interesting people and learned how to adapt — a skill, like accuracy in bug-killing, that will serve me for life.
It makes me wonder, though, about the new crop of college students who are living an entirely different Tech experience. Rather than playing racquetball at the Intramural Center and going bowling at the Bulldog Kennel, will they instead be holed up in the swanky UP apartments updating their Facebook profiles?
With individual bedrooms (what a concept) and kitchens, will students participate in the rousing conversations that would erupt from time to time in the Student Center or outside at the red tables? There’s a chance they could really be missing out.
University administrators have recognized — and rightly so — the need to upgrade facilities for the next generation of college students who have extremely high expectations. There’s no doubt that the new housing and recreation options Tech is working on will serve to raise the university’s profile and attractiveness to students and their parents, as well as faculty and staff members.
I just can’t help but indulge in a little nostalgia for the way things used to be, not that long ago. Back then, students walked to on-campus computer labs, because we didn’t all have iMacs. People passing by on campus would say hello to each other and stop and chat, because we weren’t all plugged into iPods or cell phones. And the dorm life — well, it built character, because it wasn’t nicer than our parents’ houses, which we’d just moved out of.
I bet the residents of University Park would say I’m just jealous — and they would be right.
I recently helped a family member move into a University Park apartment, and I was struck by the quality of the new housing facilities. For a moment I wondered what campus I was on.
It’s been about a decade since I loaded down my Honda Prelude with dorm room essentials and headed west on Interstate 20, destination: Tech. Student housing here in Ruston has advanced by leaps and bounds since then.
As a high school student, I got a preview of dorm life the summer between my junior and senior years when I enrolled in a class at Tech. For three weeks, my best friend and I traded our real life as Monroe teenagers for the freedom that comes with being college students. We moved into Kidd (remember good old Kidd? It’s now a parking lot) and stocked up on junk food, wielding our Tech Express cards and trying desperately to look like we belonged on a college campus.
Back then, dorm rooms didn’t have Internet connections. Heck, they didn’t even have thermostats. Every year that I lived on campus, my roommates and I would suffocate in the winter and freeze in the summer because the temperature of the entire dorm was managed by one master switch located somewhere across campus. I don’t know if there was ever a time when that particular arrangement made sense, even back in the ’60s, when many of the buildings were built.
I lived in the dorm for three of my four years at Tech. In my senior year, when I finally moved off-campus, I asked myself why in the world I’d waited so long. Now, though, for students lucky enough to live in University Park, there’s no real difference between living in university housing and living off-campus.
During those three years of dorm life, I had three different roommates and lived in three different dorms: Pearce, Kidd and Aswell. Each one had its own set of amenities and inconveniences.
There was one problem that plagued me from dorm to dorm through the years: ants. Even during my three-week stint as a faux college student I battled the dorm ants. They were back when I returned as a full-fledged freshman and were the reason I lobbied the housing office to get a dorm re-assignment (finding ants making trails through your underwear drawer would send you over the edge, too).
But alas, there they were again at the new dorm, and no amount of complaint calls from either myself or my parents seemed to get the problem solved. Eventually, I just made a habit of buying a can of bug spray every time I went to Wal-Mart (which was frequently back then, i.e. every other night). By the time I finally moved off campus, I was a pretty good shot. This skill also came in handy during The Great Cricket Invasion of 1999. I remember walking across a cricket-laden Centennial Plaza one day that year, relishing each step as I crunched crickets beneath my feet.
On-campus pests aside, life in the dorm wasn’t all bad. I met some interesting people and learned how to adapt — a skill, like accuracy in bug-killing, that will serve me for life.
It makes me wonder, though, about the new crop of college students who are living an entirely different Tech experience. Rather than playing racquetball at the Intramural Center and going bowling at the Bulldog Kennel, will they instead be holed up in the swanky UP apartments updating their Facebook profiles?
With individual bedrooms (what a concept) and kitchens, will students participate in the rousing conversations that would erupt from time to time in the Student Center or outside at the red tables? There’s a chance they could really be missing out.
University administrators have recognized — and rightly so — the need to upgrade facilities for the next generation of college students who have extremely high expectations. There’s no doubt that the new housing and recreation options Tech is working on will serve to raise the university’s profile and attractiveness to students and their parents, as well as faculty and staff members.
I just can’t help but indulge in a little nostalgia for the way things used to be, not that long ago. Back then, students walked to on-campus computer labs, because we didn’t all have iMacs. People passing by on campus would say hello to each other and stop and chat, because we weren’t all plugged into iPods or cell phones. And the dorm life — well, it built character, because it wasn’t nicer than our parents’ houses, which we’d just moved out of.
I bet the residents of University Park would say I’m just jealous — and they would be right.
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