Vassar In The Summer, Part 1

Last summer I worked three jobs. One was a full time job where I spent 40 hours per week between 3:30 in the morning till 11:30 in the morning serving airport coffee. Huge mistake. Nothing complains more than a bunch of people stressed out about making an early morning flight. My second job was interning part time for an NBC television station. While this job was more interesting, it took place directly after my coffee job, between 1:00pm and 6:00pm several times a week. I usually changed clothes in my car because it took approximately an hour to eat lunch then drive north to the station. My other job was freelancing for a newspaper in Canton, which didn't last too long. But between my other two jobs I ended up with a bad case of insomnia and a caffeine addiction. Never ever ever drink energy drinks. Ever.

After that summer, Vassar summer employment sounded like heaven. All jobs offered a salary of at least $8.00 an hour, which was much better than anything I would find in Ohio, and had regular working hours (none of that 3:30am stuff). The only conditions were that I would find my own housing (which I'll explain) and cook my own meals. Pretty certain that my family was in the economic bracket to qualify (with high-end financial aid and international students preferred), I signed up for one of the approximately 60 summer jobs offered by student employment. After what seemed to be a rigorous evaluation, I was finally accepted to work for the Infant Toddler Center. "Wait a second...." I thought to myself, "Me? Small children?! Yeah right. I can barely take care of myself, let alone a bunch of small children." After a fit of horrified laughter, I went to the Student Employment office to get the situation sorted out. Trusting me at the Infant Toddler Center was a big mistake on their part, which eventually landed me into my regular job of working for Vassar College Relations. After handling a summer full of insomnia and caffeine addiction, I was sure I could handle summer at Vassar, but having never experienced it before I wasn't sure what to expect.

Summer employment requires that students sign up for summer housing at the college, unless students opt to live off-campus, which I didn't. Campus housing goes for a fee of $5 per day, which is very reasonable considering the cost of off-campus housing, which is likely to be a couple hundred dollars per month. All students who sign up for summer housing live in the same dorm/senior housing option, which changes depending on the dorm that is currently under renovation. As a three year Cushing resident, I was devastated when I heard I would have to move into Main. And not just Main, but the fifth floor! Not only would I be living on the fifth floor, but the Main elevator was broken. How would I move all of my stuff?! At this point, it seemed like the world was coming to an end. I definitely needed help.

For five days, my boyfriend and I used his car to move my things to Main, then moved them by hand to the South wing elevator, then up to a third floor transition room that was provided by one of my friends. One thing about Main is that it hosts a large number of suites-a group a single rooms (2,3, or 4) branching off of a large common room where several students can live together. Students have the opportunity to live in the suites their sophomore, junior, and senior years and choose their suitemates. As far as I know, being a Cushing resident, this option is pretty popular. The transition room that I used was the common room of one of my friend's suites. It was a good size to fit all of my stuff, but after moving everything, I started to wonder how all of that stuff would fit into a single. But at that point, that was the least of my worries. I still had two floors left to go.

Here was the plan: After they left, I would everything by myself up the stairs to the fifth floor common room (my list included two refrigerators, two floor lamps, a television, a couch with a fold out bed, a desk chair, a bowl chair, and two desk lamps), and then wait until I was allowed to move into my new housing assignment-a painstaking process to say the least.

The night before my friend was supposed to move out of housing, I had to move my stuff to the fifth floor. I moved approximately 80% of my things within a 6 hour period, only taking a break to eat dinner, leaving them in the fifth floor common room until I would be allowed to move into my actual room the next afternoon. I put signs on them telling everyone "DO NOT TOUCH!!!" because after taking so long to get them up there, I would have had a fit if they'd miraculously disappeared. The last few things I had to carry were extremely heavy, so I decided to wait to move them until my strength returned to me the next day.

When I woke up and was ready to move again, I dragged the heaviest boxes into the hallway and contemplated how exactly a small person such as myself would be able to move them upstairs. Within a couple minutes, a few beefy looking guys came up to me and asked if I needed anything moved. I was really confused. It seemed to me that Vassar had actually hired guys to move stuff for the students in lieu of an elevator. I asked the men, "Are you the new Main elevator?" They replied, "No, we're movers." They obviously didn't get my joke. But it didn't matter, because within no time my stuff was on the fifth floor. Thank god for the new Vassar elevator.

Even though I've been going to Vassar for three years, I still feel like there are a lot of things I don't know about. For example, who knew I could rent a dolly from the Residential Operations Center in order to move my refrigerators? Apparently everyone else did. The Residential Operations Center, otherwise known as the "ROC," is located in an office in Josselyn House, which as you may know is a dorm. The ROC houses all of the keys to the dorm rooms (and their spares) on campus, and as I found out after the painstaking process of moving my stuff, moving supplies. Unfortunately, I figured this out after it took me five days to move all of my things into Main, but at least someone will be learning from my mistakes.

As you can tell, I tend to do things the hard way. Now that the nightmare is over for me, I could probably write a book on the correct way to move stuff to the fifth floor of Main (minus the mistakes that I made). But this was only one part of my summer employment ordeal-just wait until I get to food!