Save these

Whether or not it turns out that Georgetown could have prevented Sunday night’s fire in New South, it’ll probably irk at least a few residents to learn that Georgetown just made U.S. News & World Report’s list of “10 Schools With Pricey Dorms.”

It’s never too early to invest in your dream house!

If dorm living’s got you down and you’ve heard the horror stories about local landlords, the Washington Times has a new solution for you: go buy a house (or, more precisely, go get your parents to buy one for you).

The Times ran a whole feature story on the new trend of parents buying homes for their college-age kids to live in while they’re at school.  While buying a house seems like a drastic step, the article explains that with the rent and dorm prices rising and the housing market in shambles, buying a house and selling it off or renting it out to other students after graduation often makes financial sense.

While the phenomenon is most widespread in the Midwest where real estate is the cheapest, but it’s also gaining ground here in D.C.  The article features one real estate agent who sells as many as eight houses per year to Georgetown and GW students.  The piece also profiles recent Georgetown Law grad Jim Pyle, whose mother bought him a house on Capitol Hill which they sold for about $200,000 more than they paid.

Dear LXR, this actually shouldn’t be your energy use model

You may not be aware of it since, as the Voice’s Editorial Board pointed out in this week’s issue, the University hasn’t done a great job of publicizing it, but Georgetown is in the midst of Switch It Off, an inter-dorm energy use reduction competition.

Each residence hall is now competing against each other to see which can reduce its energy consumption by the highest percentage as compared to how much energy was used in the residence hall last year. There will be a prize awarded to the dorm that reduces its energy the most, but the University hasn’t yet said what exactly that will be.

Village A is currently in the lead, with a reduction in energy use of 13.1 percent from the previous school year. Six of the nine dorms have a net decrease in energy use over last year, but three have actally increased their energy use.  LXR is the big offender, with a whopping energy use increase of 18.1 percent.

Here are the full rankings:

1. Village A:  -13.1%
2. Village C:  -8.4%
3. SWQ:  -7.6%
4. New South:  -6.1%
5. Harbin:  -3.0%
6. Copley:  -0.2%
7. Henle:  +0.6%
8. Darnall:  +4.1%
9. LXR:  +18.1%

Does she rock her style or what?

Yesterday afternoon, students on five different dorm floors emerged from their rooms to find that somebody had placed baskets of Garnier Fructis products in front of every door and set up bountiful swag displays in their bathrooms. It caused a real stir. When news got around that there was free stuff in the New South boys’ bathroom, for example, stampeding ensued. (The life of a freshman is nasty, brutish, and short.)

Reports are that Harbin got gypped. Lucky for Harbinites, though, the Garnier Fructis crew is throwing a veritable block party on their patio as we speak. It’s part of their “Sing in the Shower” campaign. According to tour manager Dan Humphrey, GF will visit 12 campuses and one karaoke fiend will win $500 and a Garnier gift basket. You can win, he said, if you “rock your style,” which I guess meant they’re looking for stage personality, not vocal talent.

Freshmen ears will be ringing and the Harbin Patio will be up to 5x smoother, 5x stronger, and shinier for weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

After seeing my room’s decor, my roommate’s mother called me a minimalist. My side featured a bare wall and two pictures of my family. Her daughter’s side of the room, in contrast, was covered with photos and food.

My decorating sense was shown up even more when I started visiting some of the other rooms on my floor. Check out these awesome rooms:

An Artist’s Room

This is Lena’s room. She’s an art major and she covered her side of the room with her artwork. Some people are so talented.

She also made two posters for her friends to leave stylized messages.

Nice!

Read the rest of this entry »

The Post is just having too much fun with this recession.  First they were slyly spotlighting the adverse effect of high gas prices on the social lives of teenagers.  Now they’re gleefully chronicling the hardships of the upper-middle class and college-bound who, apparently, are learning to forsake aesthetics in favor of affordability when it comes to dorm decor.

Surprisingly, the kids in the article all come off as basically reasonable and grounded.  The most cringe-worthy quote is from an adult, Marshal Cohen, an analyst for a consumer behavior research firm, whose poor use of slang makes me question how well he really understands his key demographic:

“I don’t think it’s going to be about pimping up your room,” Cohen said.  “I think it’s about making sure the basic essentials are up to speed.”

The Post does the whole faux-sympathy thing (“the weak economy is cramping our national style”) all the while sniggering about how coddled the younger generation is (“dorm rooms … increasingly resembled urban lofts”), which just makes them seem condescending and disingenuous.

What’s most irritating about this type of article is the underlying assumption that all young people have over-inflated senses entitlement, as if we all believe that buying ridiculously overpriced dorm furnishings with mommy and daddy’s money is some kind of right of passage that we’re being cheated out of. But I think that for most college students, choosing not to buy a $29 trash can, for instance, isn’t some huge sacrifice, it’s just common sense – recession or not.

The story that a Cornell study ranked Darnall as one of the country’s most sexually-active dorms just won’t die. No such study exists, but the Voice fell for it (although that article might be in on the joke), and so did UCLA and a bad site about Georgetown. Even freshmen are passing it around. From the Georgetown 2012 Facebook group:

well i dont really know what you mean by sex jontz, but darnall was ranked the 19th most sexually active college dorm. “Darnall Hall was built in 1965 and ranked as the 19th most sexually active dorms in the country by a recent study conducted by Cornell University.“

Emphasis mine. It’s not hard to understand why it persists–it assuages the students who, faced with a dorm so bad that water fountains fall from the wall on their own, at least have some play to look forward to.

Read the rest of this entry »

It started small—just a noise, like rain in the heating ducts. Then it turned into a leak, then a cascade. Dubbed “Copley Flood ‘07″ by John Tincoff (SFS ‘09), the abundance of water that burst into the fifth floor of Copley and poured through a light fixture and the elevator shaft down to the fourth floor created shock, confusion and a few displaced residents.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, I dreamt that I encountered a fat, human-sized rat in Village A, where I live. I don’t remember the details of the dream, but I do know that rats scare the shit out of me. Every time I pass one, I halt, cringe, scream and then warn those behind me. They then look at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I’ve got rataphobia, the real scientific term for which I am too lazy to google.

Still, after dusk, squirrel territory turns into a rat’s haven. There are 2 rat hot spots: the pathway along Copley Hall (between Red Square and Healy) and the heart of Village A. At night, I avoid these hot spots. The rats are most active in the middle of Village A. If you walk near New South, the library, or on Prospect street, you’re probably OK. However, be careful on Prospect street, as I recently spotted a fox (yes, a fox, in a major city) roaming the street at 3 am.

Dude, why can’t we just have pigeons.

Posted by Keenan Steiner, Contributing Editor