Housing horror stories: Nightmare on university drive

“My freshman year roommate decided to go out one night and throw up all over my side of the room before leaving for the weekend. I did not stay in my room that weekend, and when she returned she began to yell at me and tell me it was disrespectful for me not to have cleaned up after her. She had also invited her boyfriend who had just gotten out of jail to stay with us for the week until he could find some place to go. She didn’t mention the jail part until an hour after he arrived. The same year, when I returned back to my room from Thanksgiving Break, my suitemate was drunk and wrapped in my comforter naked.”

- Ariel Brown (Class of 2013, Alumni)

“I had a roommate that kept the room at 87 degrees all year round. It was like a sauna. She sprayed oil in her hair, and it always got on my stuff, so I had to scrub the walls and my desk and everything with soap and water on a regular basis. We ended up not speaking to each other. Then I came back to school after winter break (I had left first and returned first), and I was unpacking my stuff when I turn around and see this patch of something on the floor about the size of a football. I realized it was a patch of mold, so I texted her and asked if she had spilled anything and she answered, ‘I spilled ice cream, but I didn’t feel like cleaning it up.’ So that sat on the floor for five weeks while no one was there. It smelled really bad too, so bad the smell was embedded in my books and everything I owned, so when I moved back home for the summer everything smelled like the room, and I had to wash things multiple times.”

- Maria Williams (Class of 2015)

“Freshman year, I was put in a triple with two random roommates. One was perfectly fine, but the other roommate, however, was not. We got off to a rough start on day one when he had dumped all of his stuff onto the bed that I had already put my things on, and all he could say about it was “oops.” Even my mother apologized before she left me alone with him. As the year went on, things didn’t get better. I would often come back to him on Skype with his friend, openly discussing all sorts of topics such as his friend’s sexual preferences and his detailed medical issues and how he was feeling about that. These conversations lasted until roughly 4 a.m. on nights when I had to wake up at 6 a.m. the next day to travel for a soccer game. He also spent a lot of time playing my Call of Duty on my PS3 until all hours of the night with all of the lights on, screaming at the TV at the top of his lungs when someone who could not even hear him killed him.”

- Michael Castiglione (Class of 2014)