WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16.2005
APARTMENT GUIDE
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
5C
Book celebrates, admonishes college life
BY AARON KARO
VIA KRT CAMPUS
Photo courtesy KRT Campus
Photo courtesy KRT Campus The cover art of "Ruminations on College Life" by Aaron Karo, which was released in 2004, depicts the stereotypical college student.
The following are two excerpts from "Ruminations on College Life" by Aaron Karo, 25, a New York City-based comedian and author. For more on Karo, check out aaronkaro.com.
On laundry and the dining hall
I have no idea how to do laundry.
No, no, not like I have some idea
but just don't know how much fabric
softener to use, I mean I have no
idea how to do laundry. I just had
this vision that there would be some
cute chick in the laundry room every
time I went there who would show
me how to do it. Dreams die hard,
but I have no underwear.
Campus is really a communist society. I own nothing, it all belongs to the university. I have no money, it's all my parents. My meals are served in little square portions at one brick building only during certain hours of the day! Is this college or the Soviet Union?
I love the concept of the dining hall. Because before you get to campus for the first time and you're deciding which meal plan to sign up
for, older kids will always say the same thing: "The food is terrible but it's more of a social thing for freshmen." So we know going in that the food sucks! It's like we're saying, "Hey mom, I'm going away to college but I don't really know anyone. So, could you throw me a few thousand dollars? It's for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and some friends."
Are you good with names? I forget them as soon as I hear them. Might as well not tell me at all! I have no idea what anyone's names are except my own, the kids I went to high school with, and that one hot girl who I have never spoken to but stalk from afar.
My friend Dan, like me, has no idea how to do laundry. One day, he's out of underwear, the girl down the hall won't do it for him anymore and he's desperate. So he decides to give it a try. He goes down to laundry room in the basement of the dorm and tries to figure it out. He puts his clothes in the machine, puts the detergent in, puts some quarters in, but the thing is not working. He tries everything but it's just not happening. Completely bewildered, he sees a little red help button right next to the machine and presses it.
Unfortunately, it was the emergency alarm. Sirens in the dorm start blaring, red lights are flashing everywhere, cops are on the scene in minutes and my friend has to sneak back to his room amid all this chaos wearing only a towel. He never did his own laundry again.
On small dorm rooms
When winter comes around bringing increasingly cold weather and increasingly packed frat parties, students become faced with the paradox of clothing. If you dress warmly for the walk to the party, you'll sweat to death inside the frat. But if you dress lighter, you'll freeze to death before you even make it in. So really the question is, before you die, wouldn't you rather have a couple of beers first?
do that! I literally had to velcor my TV remote control to the wall because there was no place to put it.
beers first?
Have you ever noticed that in every TV show and movie made about college the dorm rooms are huge? Kids are throwing parties in there, they have couches, its ridiculous. Let's set this straight once and for all: College kids live in what amounts to a glorified closet. We have to put our beds on cinderblocks just to have room for our clothes. Prisoners don't even have to
Still, you know what the great thing about college dorms is? If you're lucky enough to have your own bathroom — or for guys, a sink will do — it's the only time in your life when you will have every necessary amenity in one room. You can have a bed, TV, toilet, refrigerator and desk all within five feet of each other. I'm so lazy that I went out and bought a nice chair chair on wheels. By the end of the semester I didn't even get up anymore, I just swiveled and rolled.
No matter how small your dorm room is, though, it is where you will have some of your best college moments. It's where you will pregame with your best friends. It's where you will boot when you've had one tequila shot too many. It's where you will fight with your roommate about his terrible taste in music. And it is where you will hook up with the girl down the hall and then try to avoid seeing her for the rest of the semester. And by the time you move out of the dorm you'll realize, for a tiny room, you really got a lot of use out of it.
School pays cash, students clean up act for dorm tours
BY MARYANNE GEORGE
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
VIA KRT CAMPUS
DETROIT—Aaron Bennick's room is clean.
While that may seem unusual for a 19-year-old college student, Bennick is paid cold, hard cash to motivate him to keep it that way.
Bennick and his University of Michigan roommate, Eric Romain, are receiving $100 apiece this semester to let prospective students and their parents take a look at their West Quad dorm room three days a week.
The sophomore engineering majors are among 18 students in nine residence halls participating in the Michigan Campus Day tour program, according to Randi Johnson, U-M housing outreach coordinator. The tours include lunch at a residence hall and a peek inside a typical dorm room on the Ann Arbor campus.
The rules for U-M students participating in the program are pretty simple.
pretty simple.
They must be dressed and out of bed, if they are home, and allow the tour groups to see their room from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, Johnson said. Technically, a clean room isn't required, but the occupants can't display anything that's illegal, banned — like hot plates — or offensive.
their rooms because they know people are coming," Johnson said. "Parents are used to seeing rooms at home that are not perfectly clean. But I tell parents they may see things in the residence hall they will not see at home, although we have not had complaints about anything outrageous."
U-M is beginning a 10-year, $280 million renovation of its 15 aging residence halls, which house nearly 10,000 students, mostly undergraduates. The newest hall, Bursley Hall on UM's North Campus, was completed in 1968. Officials plan to open a new $138 million, 500-bed hall in 2008 that also will feature classrooms and community space.
Bennick and Romain have arranged their loft beds to fit over the desks in their fifth-floor West Quad double room. On a noontime visit last week, their blue rug was free of stains and crumbs.
A clean beige love seat with light-blue accent pillows faced a television, two refrigerators and a bookcase filled with laundry supplies and food.
know a group is coming, clean off the desks and get things off the floor."
"Last semester, the room was not as neat," conceded Bennick, who is from Saginaw, Mich. "My dad asked me if I was sure I was going to be able to do this. We pick up if we
Clothes were actually hanging in the closets, the doors of which were closed. The beds, however, were not made.
The room passed muster with Clark Iverson, 44, of Royal Oak, Mich., who was on the Friday tour with his son, Geoffrey, 18, a senior at Royal Oak Dondoer High School who has been admitted to U-M.
"It's cleaner than a 15-year-old's room," Clark Iverson noted.
Johnson said no one has ever been thrown out of the campus tour program for having an unacceptable room.
But apparently, not everyone can get in.
"We applied to be part of the program, but we never got a reply," said Natalie Wowk, 19, a
sophomore from Sterling Heights, Mich.
"They probably thought no amount of money could improve this room," joked her roommate, Adele Coehlo, 19, a sophomore from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
Coehlo's and Wowk's West Quad room, not far from Bennick's, has Christmas lights strung around the perimeter, clothes piled on the bunk beds, a futon and a papasan chair in the middle of the room. Toiletries covered both desks, and the beds were unmade.
"Our room is a little messier than the average room," Coehl admitted. "The more comfortable I am with roommates, the messier I am."
College is about sleeping around Explore your options
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