Sidebar: One Student's Experience of Life on the Honors Floor

By Cathy Caudill

It’s a weekend night. A few of the honors students have trickled out to parties, but many of the students are simply hanging out with friends.

Up on the fourth floor, a group of students are laughing. Taylor Dodge and her friends are playing Quelf—the most ridiculous board game she has ever played, where players enact the silly instructions on the cards.

Randy’s head is wrapped in toilet paper like a mummy; Ryan is speaking in an Irish accent and sounds like a leprechaun; Taylor’s hand is sitting in a bowl of warm water. Ryan draws another card that says he must speak like the opposite sex: now he sounds like a lady leprechaun.

“We were dying!” says Taylor. “We could not play straight, he was making us laugh so hard. My stomach hurt so bad from laughing.”

Taylor and her friends are all neighbors, and spend all of their time together. They play games together; they eat together; they do their homework together. Sometimes they sing along to musicals on DVD, sometimes she is helping her friend in Spanish. Sometimes they are playing Halo, sometimes her friend helps her in calculus.

It is Taylor’s first semester at school, and she marvels that she never had to endure her worst fears of going to college. “I was worried that people wouldn’t like me, or that I wouldn’t make friends, or that I’d have to eat alone in the cafeteria: be that poor little lonely soul.”

But being in the honors dormitory has helped her and many other honors students make the transition a lot easier.

Her friend, Cora Glass, says, “You knew you’d have some stuff in common with the people living on this floor, just by the fact that they’d picked to live on this floor. I generally thought that the people who chose to live here were going to be somewhat more studious.”

Taylor agrees. “It helped me make a lot more friends a lot faster. I have a lot more in common with the people. It’s much more comfortable for me to develop relationships with people who share the same interests and have the same values. For the most part everybody’s ideas about school are in the same place, so it’s very conducive—they work hard, school is very important.”

Taylor says, “I have friends in other dorms, but they come to this dorm to hang out." She has one friend who lives in McEwan across campus that knows hardly anybody in her own hall, but knows every honors dorm resident by name. “She’s trying to move in next semester—she practically lives here anyway,” jokes Taylor. “She’s an honors floor adoptee.”

There is something magnetic about the honors floor: the sense of community that has been born within the intellectual populace. Students are close enough that they can enter each other’s suites without knocking. Hardly any of them confine themselves to their rooms, and they are familiar with nearly everyone on the hall.

Taylor is glad that she had gotten to live in the honors hall. “Honestly, if I had gone into an environment where I felt like I didn’t have much in common with the people around me, I would have made even less effort to integrate myself with any group, or get involved at all. I think I would have been one of those students who goes straight to class and straight back to the room, staying there all the time and never having any fun.”

Fortunately, Taylor did not have to endure incoming freshman’s worst nightmare. “Now," she says with a smile, "I’m one of the students who goes straight from class to do my homework and then goofs off the rest of the night."