By Raena Doty
Arts & Features Editor
For many freshmen living on campus, the most nerve-wracking part of the first day is when they must meet their new roommate. It can be a moment of synergy between two new best friends, or the first bad interaction of a year-long struggle.
Angie Demce expected this on her first day - but to her surprise, when she opened the door in her residence hall, she instead found a singular double bed and an extra armchair in the corner of the room - one of the newly introduced premium single rooms.
Demce, a freshman with an undeclared major, said she expected to get a double room and an accompanying roommate, but was surprised to get a $3,000-value upgrade to her bedroom for free.
Though she’s only been here for a month, Demce said she likes life as a resident student so far.
“It’s kind of like living in your own little apartment,” she said. “It’s more than what I had at home, so I really don’t feel the need to complain about any of it.”
She added at home she never really got the opportunity to decorate her own room.
“My home walls were, like, really empty, and so I never really decorated a room of my own,” she said. “And I obviously under-packed because I didn’t expect to have all this to myself.”
She said she tends to get her decorations off Amazon, including a small poster in the corner of her room that says in groovy, ’70s-esque typeface, “Go piss girl.”
She also added she tries to keep her decorations consistent. She pointed to a rug on her floor with a sun and a moon on it, and how it matches a metal chain that shows the phases of the moon hanging across her wall.
For Demce, dorm life came with a few surprises - she wasn’t expecting how much she would need a little trash can in her room.
“I knew I would have trash, but you make a lot more trash than you think you do,” she said.
She added it was important to have a cup of coins for laundry, shower shoes, and cleaning supplies for rooms.
“I shed like a dog, so I gotta make sure I pick everything up and dust and all that,” she said.
Demce added in her first month she also realized how important it is to set schedules.
“Get a routine down. Have something to do - you will go insane without it,” she said. “And keep up your hygiene. It’s really easy to not want to be hygienic. You gotta do that - do not be the smelly freshman.”
Demce said she couldn’t go without two things in her room, both lying together on the bed - the “comfiest pillow in the world” and a blue stuffed elephant.
She explained the elephant plush was in fact her dog’s toy, and she brought it to school after the dog passed away a few weeks ago because she “needed something to remember her by.”
“She practically raised me,” Demce said, talking about her dog.
“She was a little ratty, white, crusty dog,” she added. “She was also, like, the pettiest dog ever to live. I loved her to death.”
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