Renovation is desperately needed on the campus of SMU. Last year as a freshman, I lived in Mary Hay, which is a dorm in the North Quad in the fine arts community. While the community was great, the dorm was horrible. I can still vividly remember the day I moved into the prison cell that had a pink mustang on the door with my name on it, as if the measly decorations will cover or distract you from the closet that you have to share with someone you don’t know for a year. Both my mother and I returned each others shocked glances as we wondered what the $10,000 that we had spent on a meal plan and housing was going towards.
The size of a Mary Hay room, with its tiny dimensions, does not nearly equal the amount of money students have to dish out. How in the world does SMU expect you to share a closet with someone you do not even know? Picture all of your dirty clothes mixed in together on the floor with someone else’s. That is what I experienced last year. Another factor was that the beds were non-movable, leaving them at 5 feet apart from your roommate. There is no cable in the rooms, the elevator smelled and only worked half of the time, and the bathrooms that you share with your suitemates only lock from one way, giving someone the opportunity to walk in while you are showering. After experiencing this dorm room life and what it’s like to live in such a confined area with another person, I knew that this year would definitely have to be different.
My first plan to have a better residential life at SMU was to live in Morrison-McGinnis in a single room. I then realized that the price of this room was not only more than my room in Mary Hay but it was half the size, as well. That was when I turned to SMU apartments in hopes for better living conditions, only to be terribly disappointed.
When I moved into the Colonials, the first sign that I was paying to much for my apartment was when I got locked in my bathroom because of a jammed door for 15 minutes, until my roommate heard me banging on the door for help. Jammed doorknobs were only the first out of the list of problems that my roommate and I have experienced in these apartments. Not long afterwards we experienced the invasion of roaches through our closets and coming out of our printers, as well as silverware drawers. After this, our stove and dishwasher broke and had to be replaced. Then came the last of our problems – cooling and heating systems. I moved into the apartments in July, which is in the middle of summer; one horrible night, all of a sudden, our AC was suddenly turned off and we were left stripping down to minimal clothing to survive. This also happened again two months later but this time it was for three days; they claimed that it was because Dallas was expecting a cold front to come through. Well, come on now maintenance staff, you can not always trust weather officials – the cold weather was nowhere to be found; the temperature was 85 degrees at the lowest and was not going down but only escalating. Seeing as how this is 2005, does it really make sense for any building to have a heating and cooling system that can only be programmed for one to work at a time based on what they feel is necessary?
Instead of SMU building new buildings that are not extremely necessary to the needs of the students, how about renovating the buildings we already have first. It is only common sense to remodel what we already have before we try to expand or build new buildings on campus that do not directly benefit the students. Although I have not lived in each residence hall, I have had friends in each hall and each would agree that the conditions are deplorable compared to the amount of money we pay. If SMU wants to hold on to their low-class dorm rooms, then they should lower the prices, therefore leaving no room for complaints. Until then, some changes need to be made.
For the amount of money that we spend on housing here on campus at SMU, any student could easily obtain a very nice apartment in the area for the same price, give or take $200. If SMU would only renovate their apartments (especially the Binkley ones that resemble section 8 projects from a low income neighborhood) and their dorms, maybe RLSH would see an increase in students who want to live on campus.
Crystal McCullough is a sophomore CCPA major. She may be contacted at [email protected]
