This year at Holy Cross, the beginning was as exciting and promising as ever. My roommates and I moved into our six-man room, complete with our own common room and bathroom and we believed that we were living the good life.
To have the luxury of a common room and a private bathroom was more than a lot of people on campus would get that year. However, after we settled into our room we realized it wasn’t as perfect as we had expected. There were some brown spots on the ceiling that we couldn’t identify, there was something electrical hanging by wires from the ceiling, and a lot of our ceiling tiles were uneven. No matter how many work orders we put in, these issues were still there when we moved out.
An uneven ceiling tile in one of my roommate’s closets allowed a spider to come down from the ceiling and set up a nest in her clothes. She had to throw a lot of them away. We also constantly had people letting themselves into our room to check a leak in our shower that, even with all the people coming in and out, somehow never got fixed. There was a week in the middle of the semester when we had to abandon our room because somehow there were two different types of mice that had decided to make it their home too. We caught many on sticky pads and had to get rid of them ourselves before they started laying poison down, and then got mad at us because we had set our own traps.
But this isn’t about the problems we faced in our room, this is about how they were handled. In any old building there are going to be problems, spiders and mice are things to be expected. But when it gets to the point that spiders are building nests in clothes and we have to throw them away and you can’t turn to a corner of a room without seeing a mouse, the problem has gotten out of hand. We reported all the problems we had with the room multiple times, and if any action was taken it was minimal and not effective until the problem was so big that we could absolutely not take it ourselves.
It was not only housing problems that came to light at Holy Cross this year. I have worked in Kimball for the School for three years, and this year, they decided to cut our hours in half. Yet, during finals and the busier weeks of the year, they expected us to work double the hours we had been during the year. This was not the only trouble we had with Kimball, the school closing it and the library down the week before finals for an Alumni event, throwing off everyone’s schedules in order to make some money.
Holy Cross is a place and community that I love, and I wouldn’t change my time there for anything. But no place is perfect.
Watching the new Hart center go under way and dealing with the housing issues highlighted the priorities of the school, showing how it was driving by the donors and not the actual day-to-day needs of the students. Working so hard on academics, being driven hard by the programs and the professors and then being forced to work extra hours and find places to study and eat other than Kimball and the library during the busiest time of the school year also highlighted the priorities of the school.
Holy Cross pushes us, teaches us, and turns us into human beings ready for the real world. It is a place that makes us better and a place that I love. But with all that I feel I put into the school, with all the sweat and all the effort, I want to feel that the school is going to work as hard to make our experiences there as good as they can be. I feel that the school needs to remember how hard we work there and how much we care, and that we are tomorrow’s alumni. The students needs should come first, especially their living situations and their studying.
