It is time for my midnight snack and I am excited to make Easy Mac. I grab my bowl and Easy Mac mix and walk over to the common room. The lights eerily flicker on as I walk past the ripped up couches and enter the worn down, stained kitchen. As I wait for what always feels like the longest three minutes and thirteen seconds of the day, I walk around the common room and I notice just how unwelcoming it feels. The common room on the first floor of South has a pool table, but no pool sticks, and the cloth covering the table is covered in tears. The administration often asks the student body to suggest campus improvement; and often, I believe we come up blank or with generic answers, such as more parking or better food. Instead, we should focus on improving and refurbishing our residential common rooms, making them welcoming and a comfortable place for students to relax with one another.

This year, I am very fortunate to live in a quad in South. Luckily, this gives me and my friends a space to hangout and relax. I also am thankful for the fact that I live with some of my closest friends. However, many first-year students are not as lucky. First-years are not only unable to pick their roommates, but very few live in rooms with ample space to invite a group of friends over to relax and hang out.

While I know it is implausible to completely rebuild all of the common rooms in residential buildings, I do not find it out of question to start with refurbishing, repainting, and cleaning up the common rooms in first-year dorms, such as Wertimer, Dunham and North.

I spoke to a couple friends about what they would like to see in an ideal common room. Everyone I spoke to shared the belief that there should be a full kitchen, which I believe all common rooms have, but also said that the school should provide cooking and cleaning supplies. I do see how that could be an issue as they might be stolen or people would not clean them; if students can take a test unproctored, they can responsibly use cooking supplies. It is a small minority of students, especially first-years, that cook their own food, but it also b comes much more plausible that students would if the supplies were there.

The other major theme was that there should be more gaming facilities. Some dark side dorms have ping pong tables and many dorms have broken pool tables. However, I think working pool tables or games like foosball would be widely used in common rooms. Additionally, no common rooms have board games or tables for games. I think that it would provide opportunity for first-year students to connect with one another if more games were available to them.

The third new improvement would be to have a large projector and desktop computer system connected. This would be similar to many classrooms on campus. Having a computer connected to a projector system would allow for students to stream movies or television shows from the computer onto a bigger screen.

While having a television with cable is nice, a computer allows for more options and students will be more likely to go to the common room for weekly shows, such as

The Bachelor

, or for big games like the Super Bowl.

Improving residential common rooms would allow for an increased sense of community. While in an ideal world all commons rooms would be redone, it is much more practical and impactful to at least start with dorms that house first year students.