After living in Garfield Hall side A for only a semester, I have to say it’s not an experience I recommend for those who are faint of heart. 

Garfield is a troublesome dorm housing most of the freshmen class lives in, as it is one of the less expensive dorms and has the most space. While they also claim to house the criminal justice community, nothing is done for it. 

Living in the dorms at Garfield is the best and worst experience for the life of a college student.

It’s hard to adjust from living with your parents and even siblings to living with another human being called a roommate. Now do not take my words to heart because I’m just a freshman who has witnessed the horrors of the Garfield Hall bathrooms, but this is my opinion on how dorm life is not livable, but tolerable at best. 

For the most part I have a clean roommate, luckily, who can attest that the hall group chats are exclusively for yelling at each other to move their laundry out of the one of two washers or dryers, or for the RA to yell at the residents to be quiet. 

Thankfully the laundry room requires no coins as amenities come included in the housing expenses, but everyone forgets to move their laundry around during the day. So it could be a week or two till it’s your turn to do laundry, not to mention that the floor is always covered in lint or laundry soap. 

Somehow, no one understands that the walls are very thin and blasting music on the speaker past quiet hours is not appreciated. You can hear everything and anything happening between each room. 

While this is all troublesome enough, this is without mentioning the bathrooms.

For context, my hall went to the glow dance the first weekend of school, where everyone is covered in glow paint for fun. Now every time I go to take a shower, I see the same haunting glow paint, which must be a stain by now. 

In its essence, going to shower in Garfield means avoiding the clumped hair collected at the top of the drain and wearing shower shoes to move on with life.

I do not understand how the girls’ bathrooms are such a mess. Is the trope that all girls are clean a lie? 

For example, a couple of weeks ago after returning from Thanksgiving break, some of the girls decided to celebrate being back by taking toilet paper, wetting it, then throwing it on the ceiling where it stayed for two weeks. 

To whomever is leaving their loophas in the shower, please dispose of it by setting it on fire. That thing has likely seen a lot of horrors. 

All in all, Garfield Hall is a place to live, despite its many, many issues. And that’s good enough for the struggling college student. 4/10.