My first year at Hofstra University, I lived on a co-ed floor made up of mostly freshman students. I lived on the same floor as people who liked to blast music until 2 a.m. and my dorm was directly across from the men’s bathroom – it was a long year. Going into this year, I assumed things would be different and that what I experienced was an outlier due to being a floor made up of mostly freshmen. However, I would soon be proven wrong as the same dorming experience repeated itself. I love living in the towers – I am a tower defender – but we need to clean up after ourselves and respect each other and our spaces if we want to have a good living experience.
The main thing I hear from my friends who live in suite-style living is that they could never handle the shared bathrooms. The bathrooms themselves are fine. Hofstra’s janitorial staff cleans them every morning, but the issue arises when people don’t pick up after themselves – which has become increasingly common. People leave behind hair and paper towels, and they don’t flush, which is arguably impressive, seeing as the toilets flush automatically.
This apathy has gotten to the point where I had to fish someone else’s used menstrual product out of the toilet – that had clearly been there a long time – because it was clearly blocking the pipe. I removed it myself because I worried nobody else on the floor would even bother, or they would try to flush it, which would only cause the toilet to become even more clogged or even flood. Period products can’t be flushed, and there are two trash cans in the stalls specifically for them. The only reason that it would have been in there is just laziness. We need to do better.
You may be thinking, “Well, the janitors come every morning. It will get cleaned when they come,” and you’re right, they do, and it will. But it shouldn’t be their job to handle a mess that you could easily clean yourself. The janitorial staff at Hofstra are people, too, people who clean both bathrooms on each floor in the towers every single morning. Their time should be spent disinfecting the bathroom and doing cleaning that we can’t easily do ourselves, not picking up clumps of hair left in the shower drain or, worse, the shelf under the shower head.
You are an adult living on your own. You have a support system with the janitorial staff, but you won’t always have that. So, be grateful that you do have them, thank them when you see them and do not shove past them if they are vacuuming the hallway.
On the topic of the bathroom, an important thing to remember is that the bathroom echoes and the walls are thin, thus making any conversations you have in there much louder. If you are fighting with your partner on FaceTime, you should be aware that the entire floor can clearly hear every word you are saying. Even if you are totally justified in the argument, nobody else wants to hear about it. In this case, avoiding having loud phone calls in the bathroom isn’t just basic manners, it also helps your privacy.
And it isn’t just the bathroom where you are louder than you think you are, it’s also your dorm. If you’re yelling about something, singing loudly or screaming for fun, you can be heard. Obviously, your dorm is yours – and sometimes your roommate’s – space, and you can do whatever you want there – within reason – but the dorms around you aren’t, and people don’t want to hear you in their space. It’s distracting when someone is working, disrupting when someone is trying to sleep and just annoying when someone is trying to unwind. I will admit, even I’m guilty of this sometimes, especially during hockey season, but you don’t have to be silent in your room. You can still be excited, and you can still sing. Just be mindful of your volume.
We’re living on our own for possibly the first time, but we don’t live alone. While we have people like the Resident Assistant staff to help and take care of the floor, the people with the biggest influence on each other are our neighbors. How we behave and how we clean up after ourselves is what makes or breaks a dorming experience. It is up to us to make sure we all have a good living experience, so please, take the extra second to clean up after yourself, lower your volume by a little bit and just be kind to your neighbors.
