Photo Essay
The community I am focusing on is a dorm building. A dorm building is a place where students should meet new people with all new experiences. Sadly, this dorm community is slowly becoming more and more corrupt. This corruption among residents is cause by the dorm rooms becoming increasingly more inclusive year by year. The more pampered the student are in the dorm, the less of a chance they will leave that dorm and meet new people. Unfortunately, this trend of dorms becoming souped up to fit students demands is a slippery slope. The additive luxuries within the dorms are expected by incoming students. Dorm rooms should not be so well furnished because they are raising tuition costs, reducing student interaction, and raising expectations of the standard of dorm room living.
I took this photo of my neighbors “four person suite” dorm room. This image shows the delicacy us freshman get in coming to the University of Kentucky. This pampering we get causes us to stay in our dorms as much as possible. As an incoming freshman I got a lot of advice. The number one most said thing to me was to get out and make friends. With something like a “four person suite” why would anybody want to leave their dorm. As dorms get bigger, fancier, and more expensive students are spending more time in them and less time making connections with people that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. In the older style dorms, students had no choice but to get out of the dorm and dobe active within the community of their buildings. If they did not, they would be subjected to sitting in a tiny room with little commodities. I think living in a small, basic room is all part of the freshman college experience. These new dorms are taking away from that experience.
The image above is a picture I took of the “social room”. The “social room” is a place where student are supposed to come and hangout with other students. It is no surprise that this room made for social interaction is empty. As I pass by this room a few times a day, I rarely see people gathered in it. I think that this is caused by the dorm rooms being too nice. Why would you go to the social room and hangout if your dorm room is just as nice? On the other hand, if this nice room was in the old dorms I believe that there would be people in it much more frequently. For the old dorms, this would be one of the nicest rooms in the building cause it provides the space that people would need in order to go in it and interact.
Source 1-
An article written by Kyle Stokes talks about how colleges are putting more and more money into there dining halls and residences halls. This is because students are choosing on where they will go to college based on the food options and dorm room commodities. I think students should be choosing where they will attend school based on academics. This competitive market that colleges are in now is caused by students wanting bigger and better living conditions. As a result college tuition is becoming increasingly more expensive. One might say you can live off campus… Not true. Most colleges mandate freshman to live on campus for their first year. As a direct result, students must spend more money on campus to obtain items that would be cheaper if they could purchase it off campus.
Source 2-
This article by Lynnette Khalfani-Cox describes how newer dorms are becoming so modern to the point where they are better than what the students are accustomed to. Khalfani- Cox said, “These days, many residential units for students seem to mirror—or even top—what most American kids experience at home”(Khalfani-Cox Pg. 1). The author goes on to talk about the many advancements of the living experience as college students. These advancements cause students to be disappointed upon leaving their dorm rooms and possessing their own living accommodations off of campus. She also talks about residence halls having pools, spas, and basketball courts. (Khalfani-Cox Pg. 1). I do not think these advancements are necessarily good for the students education. These many distractions can distract students from their school work.
Work Cited:
Source 1-
Stokes, Kyle. "In College Dorms And Dining, How Nice Is Too Nice?" StateImpact Indiana RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.
Source 2-
Khalfani-Cox, Lynnette. "Why Students Shouldn’t Live Large on Campus." EBONY. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.
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