The PANANOLE News: FSU-Panama Student E-Zine

College has often been described as a time of transition in the lives of young adults. Not only is it a time of challenging the mind and obtaining a higher level of knowledge, but for many it is also the first time they experience living away from the homes in which they grew up. Often, for reasons of convenience, students choose to move into university provided dormitories, where they are assigned to live with people they have never previously met.

After the initial settling in, students often find themselves experiencing new emotions that are a result of separation from lifelong ties to family and friends. This is a critical time for students to choose how they will deal with these emotions, and whether they will use them to become exasperated with their situation, or to further their character development. If used properly, these emotions can ultimately drive student to build new friendships and strong bonds with those around them, who are probably feeling the same things. As these new relationships are forged, personality conflicts can arise over issues such as cleanliness, and students are forced to learn negotiation skills, as well as patience for other peoples’ views and opinions.

The bedrooms. Photos by Elysia Beech.
For many college freshmen, it is their first taste of “freedom” away from parents and house rules. Students find that without the nagging of their parents, they must strive to be self-motivated and disciplined. This does not just apply to homework assignments or class attendance, but also to things such as cooking and cleaning. Everyone seems to be very aware of the danger of gaining “the freshman fifteen” pounds, but for many dorm students, this is not enough motivation to avoid constantly ordering out for food. Perhaps it’s that we get tired of eating the same peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day for lunch, but one sign that we may have made ordering out into a bad habit is when the pizza place can recognize your voice, and they already know your order. Or maybe we start to recognize this habit as we realize that we have a wealth of delivery telephone numbers memorized, even as we’re forgetting cell phone numbers of high school friends, or finding ourselves incapable of memorizing dates and times for pending tests.

The kitchens. Photo by Elysia Beech.
Either way, when we do finally realize we need to learn to cook, we have some high fantasies about our culinary abilities, and often feel like failures when our efforts do not produce the same gourmet fare that our mothers seemed to be able to produce with ease. Maybe part of the problem is that we don’t want to shop for groceries. We hold out on going to the supermarket until even the mice can’t find anything in our cupboards. Thus, we find we don’t ever have the right ingredients, and we are forced to make bizarre substitutions. Either way, it seems to be a destructive cycle that always lands us back at the telephone, ordering out for our next meal.

Incidentally, as far as family goes, one clear indication of familial loneliness is when we begin to feel attachment to the mice in the cupboards and the lizards behind the curtains, going so far as to name them because they are, after all, familiar faces. However, these emotions can be positive in that they drive us to create new ties with our roommates and housemates. Often these ties happen through strange circumstances, perhaps the shared effort of trying to kill a seemingly immortal cockroach at 2:00 a.m., or having to repack the freezer after 75 lbs. of frozen food has landed on top of you. These experiences become points of commonality between students, which enable them to begin to tolerate each other's loud music and other irritating habits. Perhaps over time, these habits may even become endearing as you watch each other face challenges and grow into the mature adults that you will become. This process happens as you learn to be less self-centered, and listen to others’ problems, and be considerate of their feelings in a given situation.

The living rooms. Photo by Elysia Beech.
As practical lessons are learned, such as not washing red or blue clothes with the white ones, and not baking cookies on preheat, we also learn how to deal with and appreciate those who differ from ourselves, and these are skills which will prove invaluable in the “working world.”

At first glance, dorm life may appear to have too many disadvantages to be worth the trouble, but a deeper look will reveal that the experience is really what you choose to make it, and that dorm life can often help prepare students for the future, perhaps as much as classroom time. And though some students may choose not to glean all the enrichment that dorm life offers, others have found it to be a very positive experience that they wouldn’t trade for all the cleanliness and organized freezers in the world.