On Grad Student Housing.
In my last post, I mentioned that my college is on spring break this week, but that I’m sticking around the campus area instead of going home. Since writing about the joys of an empty library, I have experienced very little over this break, and have fallen into boredom and, ultimately, despair, as I languish around an empty college campus day after day. Today has been the first day here of weather above 50 degrees since October, so I decided it would be the perfect opportunity to venture out farther into the periphery of campus and explore areas I’ve never seen before. Of course, despite it being a beautiful 77 degrees outside, I opted to ride the campus bus. I did this because I wanted to see the fabled graduate student housing complex located at the very edge of campus, which would easily take an hour to walk to from the other side of campus.
I had heard stories of the apartments (kitchens starting on fire, etc.) from the TAs I have who live there, and for some reason the prospect of actually going there and seeing it first hand made me giddy, as though it were a magical, mythical sort-of place. The bus went past all of the obscure science buildings - Animal Sciences, Agricultural Sciences, etc. - and some administrative office buildings, to signal that we were no longer in “campus proper.” Our entire campus borders a lake, so the drive was actually quite beautiful and picturesque on this uncharacteristically nice day in March. Fifteen minutes and countless stops later, the bus was entering the housing complex. I also observed that the bus - which was empty when I got on and the start of the route - was now packed full, and I also observed that I was the only white guy on it. This was a welcomed cultural experience (that totally makes me sound like a sheltered white kid from suburbia), and I had the opportunity to practice my listening comprehension skills in the foreign language I primarily study. Often times on the campus bus I overhear xenophobic students complaining about their foreign TAs and professors. I can only imagine how livid they would be were they on the bus on this particular day.
The apartment buildings themselves were very quaint and low-key; not high-scale, but not unkempt either. They were, in a way, very unpretentious, hiding the intellect and determination contained within. I actually didn’t see many people outside, which disappointed me. I imagined groups of intellectuals grilling out and swapping hypotheses with each other. Instead, I saw a lot of children running around and playing with each other. I think it would be kind of weird to grow up as a child in this community, which was both isolated from the “outside world” (the entire complex was basically on a peninsula surrounded by the lake) and filled with adults who homogeneously shared a profession (student, teacher, or sometimes both). There was also a “community garden,” which suspiciously looked more so like a landfill than any sort of garden I’ve ever seen.
As you can tell, it’s been a slow “news week.” Hopefully when school resumes somebody will do something that pisses me off so I can vent about it here, being the passive-aggressive individual that I am.
----
Date: March 31, 2010
File under: college
