Now, everyone knows how much E. Gordon Gee is my homie. Gee and me love to hit the town on a Friday night in my Escalade riding on 22s and hollering at the girls. Unfortunately though, as is all too common in life, we have disagreements.
Rekindling the two-year housing requirement is a bad idea. If you have ever lived in the dorms – which many of us have – you can say some aspects are fun. Honestly though, it really is not that fun. Where I lived, there were locked bathrooms, and I had to walk all the way down the hall; it was never clean, my room was the size of a sardine can. In the summer, it was too cold and in the winter it was too hot. You had to do what the university told you, and on top of all that, it cost an exorbitant amount.
I am all for having my money go back to the school rather then some realty company that doesn’t fix my stove when it breaks once a week because it was made when Jesus actually walked the Earth. The problem is the dorms just plain suck. It is a bad living environment. It is too many people in one place, and many of them are excessively messy.
I am the type of person who does not like other people to have control over my life. Having the university telling me what I can and can’t do just does not sit well with me. It also does not help people mature up and learn about the “big boy” world. If sophomores are kept in the dorm, it’s just going to be one more year that they won’t get to learn about how the real world is and what they have to do. Let students do what they want. They pay enough in tuition anyway.
Instead of making the sophomores stay in a dorms, the university should buy up the off-campus housing, especially if OSU is worried about the money factor. This would hopefully clean up the area a bit and even make it a bit safer so people aren’t getting shot every other day in the Gateway parking garage.
If OSU is not worried about money, it should leave the option open. I am one of the students who did live off-campus my sophomore year and I am extremely glad I did. I learned more from that experience then I ever would in the dorm, and that has helped to make me a more prepared person for when I get a “big boy” job. Sophomores and juniors are preoccupied looking for internships, solidifying their majors and figuring out what they want to do with their lives. How do we expect them to figure this out if they can’t even live on their own? I learned a lot about myself from living on my own. I would not be prepared for the real world if I had not had these experiences.
Ben Schwarzwalder is a senior in journalism. He can be reached at [email protected].
