As I get used to reaching up without accidentally punching the ceiling light in my room, I find myself thinking back to freshman year and agreeing with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s sentiment, “Low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp the soul and the mind.”
Olds Residence has its charms, but you don’t need to live in a fire trap with one door to have culture in your dorm.
As an Olds girl turned Mac resident assistant, I’ve experienced the best and the worst of both dorms. McIntyre Residence is better.
Preparing for freshman year, I requested that bunker — lovingly known as Olds — on the promise of camaraderie in exchange for air conditioning, exterior windows, and personal space.
“It’s the community,” my tour guide told me.
McIntyre, everyone said, was for the freshmen who wanted to go out every weekend and didn’t care about making friends in the dorm.
That may have been true of McIntyre in the past, but the McIntyre I know has a better culture than what I experienced in Olds.
The dorm’s layout and mix of athletes and non-athletes means that building community requires intentionality. That makes it all the more beautiful. Nobody has to see anybody in McIntyre, but they still choose to. If you walked through McIntyre last Saturday night, you would have found residents watching movies and talking on the couches, cooking dinner for one another in the kitchens, and playing board games in the lobbies.
The most activity I saw in the Olds lobby on any given evening was the RA eating cereal while sitting desk, a girl frantically highlighting her Western Heritage reader, and that Olds Boy on the couch waiting for his Hillsdate.
While being an Olds girl invites a list of assumptions about who you are as a person, McIntyre women must depend on their own character to establish themselves on campus.
Freshmen in McIntyre don’t depend solely on their dorm for their identity. They are independent, develop social lives beyond the dorm, and cultivate male friendships. If part of the college’s mission is to help the student rise to self-governance, students should have the independence within the residence halls to make decisions about how they invest their time. They can learn to be outgoing, well-adjusted adults in the process.
Not to mention, it’s hard to complain about more showers and toilets and higher ceilings. Facilities aren’t everything, but they’re not nothing.
Since McIntyre offers natural light and more than three square feet of floor space, I want to spend time there studying and relaxing. I’m happy to come back to my room at the end of the day. I’ll forgo the no-AC badge of honor for a space that offers suite-style bathrooms, functional kitchens, and the ability to get onto my bed without being an Olympic gymnast.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned living in both dorms, it’s that they serve different purposes and different demographics of women. McIntyre offers a strong dorm community if you choose to invest yourself in it, but also allows independence.
McIntyre isn’t Olds. It’s not supposed to be.
