Mollie Shiflett ’26 is a double major in history and linguistics, not that she knows what to do with that. She plays on Women’s Club Soccer Gold for the College of William and Mary and is an avid fan of most sports — except golf. Email Mollie at mrshiflett@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
When I was a freshman, and it’s been a minute since that was the case, I wrote an article that said students who lived in Lemon Hall should have to switch with students who lived in other dorms — all in the name of fairness, of course (and a little schadenfreude, I lived in the Green and Gold Village). I’m not naive. I know that will never happen, but with all the brand new dorms about to open I thought it might be worth it for all of the very fortunate incoming freshmen (and even some rising sophomores) to know what they’re missing out on.
The lack of A/C. You have no idea how many times I prayed for A/C as a freshman. We were supposed to have it in our lounge, but I swear that was broken too. And it’s not even that. When I was a sophomore I thought, “oh, it will be better now” and in some ways it was. We had a radiator in our room that blew freezing or boiling air at any given time — except for when it seemed to stop working — and we had tons of windows and a great view — that we needed to climb three flights of stairs for, which doesn’t sound like a big deal until you try to carry a footlocker up those three flights of stairs.
They will also probably never know the pain of having to time your laundry to the weather. Your only free time this week? Too bad. Unless you want to carry your clothes through a thunderstorm, you’re gonna have to wait to do it (to be fair, I never waited, but sometimes I wish I did.) 19th and 20th century people and college students: the only two groups who need to think about the weather when they want to wash their clothes.
And now, we’re going to get a whole new class of students who have literally no idea the hell we all went through. The 100-person-deep housing waitlist, praying that you got a room literally anywhere because you weren’t going to have a car and all the spots in Midtown were gone.
I’m all for improvements to the campus and dorms. I’m not so petty that I think that all the freshmen that come in need to suffer the way I did (which, to be fair, wasn’t all bad), but I think we’re losing a major cultural landmark here. We’re running out of generations of students that are going to remember the interesting presents sometimes left in the GGV ceilings, or whatever happened in the Botetourt Complex (besides complaining about how far away they lived from everything). I mean, trauma bonding is a cliche that is in my opinion a little overused, but those sh— dorms do offer a chance for connection, not always necessarily with the people you live with, but with the school as a whole. You knew that there were generations before you who had b—ed about living in GGV, and you knew that there would be generations after you who would b— about it, and maybe that gave you a little sense about being part of a whole — or you rationalized it like that, who knows.
And to be fair, those dorms aren’t completely gone yet, but they’re quickly being outnumbered. When I was a freshman, the vast majority of us were in shitty dorms. Now with all the remodeling, they won’t be. We were subjected to the dregs of housing. We were subjected to the construction and the housing shortage. Now we don’t even get to enjoy the products of that construction, freshmen will get to instead. And that can’t be fair, can it?
Let’s be clear, I’m mostly still jealous of the incoming freshmen who will live in the new dorms (if only because they know that all their stuff will be clean) but I also kind of feel a little bad for them. There’s something to be said for growth through suffering, and we all suffered plenty. We will be the last group of students who really get it, and as happy as I am to see GGV and the rest of them go (and I am — if I could lay the dynamite myself, I would, because it was really gross sometimes), it’s still an ending, and I don’t do super well with those.
