Everything I’ll miss about the dorm life

It’s a real community

Everyone has their personal opinions about Residence Hall living. There are the memories that will be engraved in your mind forever. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Some people love the dorms and choose to return, we know these people as the Residence Assistants. Others, although they may leave with memories to last a lifetime, will never return.

Here are a few things that I will never forget about living in the dorms.

Leaving your door open

Everyone who has ever lived in the dorms will tell you to LEAVE YOUR DOOR OPEN. My roommate and I took this advice very seriously and religiously left our door open the first month of school. I cannot tell you how many people we met due to this.

One of my favorite nights was when a drunken boy stumbled into our room— thinking it was his friend’s room.

My name is Delany, he thought my name was Dandelion. He ended up hanging out with us for several hours, leaving and returning; he also did laundry with us.

Overall, I will miss always having people to right down the hall to hang out with when I’m bored.

My amazing roommate and my first dorm hall photo.

Showering like a true community

There is nothing like a good Sunday morning shower after a Saturday football game. I will never forget one fine, September morning when I couldn’t wait to get the tailgate grime off of my body. The water was running hot, I stepped in and I realized that something smelled sort of funky. I looked down only to find that I had immersed my feet in the vomit of a fellow floor-mate.

Another time, there was a putrid smell coming from one of the shower stalls. Curious as my friends and I were, we discovered that someone had mistaken the shower floor for the toilet (happens all the time, right?)

It’s safe to say that I will really enjoy having a completely private shower next year.

These are a few of my roomies for nest year, hopefully, they see this and respect the shared shower space.

The late night walks down the hallway…

Getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom is a shared experience among all Residence Hall goers. The lights are half lit (quiet hours, duh) and most every door is closed. It’s hard to mind your own business, though, when a floor-mate that is getting lucky becomes a bit too vocal.

This has happened to me all too many times before. I definitely will not complain if I never hear two frisky college students getting it on in the middle of the night when I embark on a trip to the bathroom ever again.

Burnt popcorn

For the broke college student population, we all know the struggle of living off of ramen noodles and popcorn. It’s not uncommon to walk through the halls every once and a while to be hit with the scent of overcooked popcorn. Hey, it happens to the best of us,

I won’t ever forget the Friday night of Halloweekend when I woke to the sound of fire alarms. It must be burnt popcorn, I thought to myself. I was proven utterly wrong when I walked out of my door only to see a hallway filled with smoke. There was an actual room on fire, and thankfully, no one was hurt, but I will always remember the time that our floor caught on fire.

Long. Live. Slater Nine.

This is my dad and brother donating two dollars to the room that caught on fire. They put a cup on the handle that said, “donations for 944”.

Late night talks

Our floor was indeed put on probation this year, due to an excessive amount of noise complaints. It seems to be that we get quite chatty after late nights out, but we just want to share our experiences with each other, give us a break!

On a more sentimental note, I really will miss being able to just hang out all night with the new best friends that I have made on my floor. We have gotten so close and I think it was because we spent so many nights staying up until the new hours of the morning just learning about one another and talking about life.

I have to give a huge shout out to Slater Residence Hall for gifting me with stories that I can tell for years and years to come.

So, whether you enjoyed your dorm experience or not, hopefully, you can take something away from the nine months that it was your home.

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University of Iowa