Students have begun to move back into their rooms after being displaced while work to repair water-damaged 10 West rooms was underway. Now after nearly three weeks, the maintenance process has come to a close for some, while others remain separated from their roommates and their belongings.
During construction, students had been asked by administration to stay out of the way, forcing many of the students to attempt to work around the schedules of the workers in order to enter their rooms and retrieve any property they needed. Residents of room 313 stated that when they were in their room, they had positive experiences with the workers. Gia Sarkis said that talking to the workers, “gave us the updates we weren’t getting from ResLife.”
Issues did arrive when Suffolk administration heard that students had returned to their rooms unattended, leading to Jessica Wheeler, Suffolk’s Residence Director, to email a group of students to inform them of her concern. Wheeler wrote to the students, “We want to get you back into your room as quickly as possible and that requires some compliance on your end.”
In an interview with The Journal, sophomore Jillian Hanson said that she and her roommates had done their best to stay out of the way of any work being done, but that, “we needed to get our books, I don’t know how they were expecting us to be productive without our class material.”
The process of relocation proved to be a stressor for several students, who were subject to many inconsistencies with placement into their temporary housing. Some students were offered hotel rooms for their period out of the dorms, while another had been asked to sleep in a room with two other strangers, exceeding the designed capacity of the suite.
Michal Kanra, a resident of room 214, was lucky enough to be asked to stay coincidentally with his roommate from the previous year, while 213 resident Sabrina Young described living in the four person room they were assigned as “rough” but that, “it is doable.”
Those students living in room 313 returned Tuesday night, ending the commute some had to make from hotels or home to their classes. Having seen the condition of the suite throughout multiple states of construction, Hanson was excited to see what progress had been made in the past few days. After moving back in, she said that the room “looks amazing,” and that “everything looks brand new, even the bathroom was spotless.”
For some students, this event is a just blip on the radar of stories to tell in years to come, but for several of the seniors affected, they will have spent several of their last weeks in the rooms of strangers, asked to make an appointment in order to step foot in their own bedroom.
