Margie Creen

Many students living in the dorms would love to have two televisions, four refrigerators, two video game chairs, six beds, and three portable closets. However, most students don’t live in a dayroom with five roommates.

Josh Cecetka, Ned Horsted, Justin Thompson, Jon Schaefer, Miles Tate, and Cody Catron all live in the former second floor dayroom of Mathews Hall. Six guys in one room seems like a recipe for disaster, but as Horsted explains, “All our personalities match. We all get along.”

Upon walking in the room, to the left you see loft beds with a couple of desks shoved underneath them. To the right, you see a futon facing a large TV with an entire collection of game consoles below it. Against the east wall, sit four desks with computers, papers, books and empty soda cans strewn across each of them.

The room is pretty neat, as far as dorm rooms go, but the trash is overflowing and when asked about whose turn it was to take it to the dumpster, Cecetka momentarily took his eyes off the TV screen, shrugged, and simply said, “Whoever gets (to) it.”

The atmosphere is relaxed. None of the guys have any big problems with each other, aside from whose turn it is to clean, and most complaints are about the dorm room itself.

“Sometimes it’s hard to find space,” Schaefer said, “You have to be creative.”

Thompson agreed and added that the room needed “a little organization.”

They didn’t choose to be roommates. Schaefer, Tate, and Catron are all from Mitchell, but they didn’t really know each other.

Michael J. Kervin, Associate Director of Residential Life, said that none of the students living in any of the dayrooms on campus chose to live there.

“We did have many people that chose to live in quads,” Kervin said.

Quads are basically two regular dorm rooms with a doorway connecting them. The four person rooms can be found in Mathews, Brown, Hansen, and Waneta Halls.

Kervin explained that one of the benefits of living in a dayroom versus a quad, or even a normal dorm room, is that when a roommate decides to move out, residential life does not replace him or her. The remaining roomies gain the lost space.

The guys in second floor Mathews already might be losing someone.

“I was planning on moving in with a friend,” said Horsted, a freshman from Harrisburg.

Kervin explained that there would be no residents in the day rooms next year. The new building (which remains unnamed) will cure the problem.

As for now, the men of 229 Mathews are enjoying the situation.

#1.885956:130265423.jpg:dayroom 1.jpg:Photo by James Searls: