My daughter’s school does a LOT of things the wrong way and I have been frustrated over the bureaucracy many times, but on thing they did right was assign the rooms in the suites. About 90% of freshmen live in the freshman village, which are suites of 4 single bedrooms, a double bathroom, kitchenette. Each person was assigned A, B, C, or D, and even the kitchen cabinets that locked (although I think the girls rarely locked them) were assigned. Three of the bedrooms were identical, and the 4th at the end of the hall was a little different. The desks were build in so couldn’t be moved. The beds could be moved but there weren’t a lot of choices of how to arrange them.
It was great to move in and not have issues of who took the ‘better’ room. Because of a mix up my daughter was the last to move in, but she had the best room (IMO) because it was pre-assigned. UCLA could have assigned the top bunks to the ‘better’ closets and ‘worse’ desks, and then if you get bed A, you get closet A and desk A. If all three roommates didn’t agree on how to assign the beds/desks/closets, you kept the one you were assigned.
“But I think they may have inadvertently made Ashly feel that she had been left out of decision-making about the room up to that point. Or something else. They could have done this totally politely, and with good intentions. I referred earlier to what Ashly perceived, real or imagined.”
QM. Ashly describes herself as a ticking time bomb. That’s not the language of someone who approaches a situation in good faith but is attacked/provoked and feels that she has to defend herself. Why is it so hard to believe that she came out swinging, unprovoked? Everyone else on this thread seems to understand this.
That is a really nice set-up, twoinandonedone. Triples are pretty bad to cope with. I understand why public universities have to have them sometimes. But as a faculty member who has taught through the triple-years and non-triple-years, I can tell you that the non-triple-years are almost always much better for the students in the dorms.
I don’t. There simply isn’t enough credible information available for me to accept this story at face value.
QM, my freshman year I lived in a triple - only there were four of us. Students were living in private dining rooms. Yield was far more than anticipated. Everyone made the best of it, but it was tough.
This might have been posted up-thread, but if I had to guess about the closet thing, I bet the two white closets are built ins and there is a free standing wardrobe as the third closet. The room was probably built as a double and is now a triple.
I am sorry about your experience, beebee3, #131. It sounds terrible. I am glad it worked out, but it must have been heart-stopping for a while.
Wow, sabaray, a quadruple sounds awful!
I want to comment about a situation that I learned about when I was an undergrad. In the midst of what seemed to be a minor dispute in a dorm, student A flew off the handle at student B. It looked as though A was totally in the wrong. But it turned out that student B had told student A not to “get uppity,” just before A flew off the handle. Based on more discussion, it appeared that student B genuinely had not known that the term was racially charged. That seemed astonishingly clueless to me at the time, but information available to different people is different. I am essentially certain that student B would not have used the term, if she had had a baseline understanding of student A’s background.
I do not (emphasize not) think that there was anything so blatant going on in this case. But it is not right to back-fill the exchanges in the absence of information.
Given everything that has transpired, it would probably be best for the young women to part ways. Living with strangers is hard enough in a traditional two person dorm room; it would have to be really difficult to make it work with three in the best of circumstances. All of these women deserve a fresh start without all this history.
“Do you know high schoolers who don’t use any social media”
@QuantMech - I do . My DS17 does not use social media at all. He does read articles on the internet and gets emails from school but he doesn’t have accounts for twitter/FB/snapchat or any of those that he posts on. MY DS19 on the other hand is on social media all the time…
The problem with switching rooms to get away from a crazy roommate is that often the only rooms available were vacated by people who moved to get away from their crazy roommate. Out of the frying pan, into the fire…
Rather than always making the normal roommate move, they could instead put the two crazy roommates together in the same room. The RAs could sell tickets and take bets. “You know the law: Two men enter, one man leaves …”
Apparently there was an actual psychological experiment like this (The Three Christs of Ypsilanti) -
“I’m in a Facebook group for college admissions counselors, and some members were skeptical that anyone would behave like Ashly without provocation. A bunch of counselors who have worked in Res Life in the past set them straight. “That’s real. I’ve seen crazier than that many times.””
We had that thread here on CC a few weeks back with the crazy roommate who took both closets and dressers to herself and thought she was justified because she had moved in first! Yeah, there are some interesting folks out there.
“Her roommates may also regret having published the emails and their own names.”
If you look at the Facebook page of one girl and her postings, she doesn’t seem regretful.
Add me to those who knows several teens/college students who don’t use social media.
Really, there is some textbook personality disordered behavior going on here:
Assume ill intent until proven otherwise.
Vague manipulative threat
Classic non-apology “Yes I did a bad thing, but you made me do it”. There is no true apology in the snippets provided.
I am entitled to act out, but you’re not
Statement stands on its own, remarkable only that it is a bit self-aware
Victim mentality – it’s harder for me than for other people
Ashly does show some self-awareness and some intent to change, so that is hopeful. However, at no time does she offer a true apology for launching into attack mode, nor for any hurt feelings or anxiety she may have caused her future roommates – that is evidently their problem to deal with, as she just is who she is & other people just have to take it.
I thought the response written by Giustina was excellent – calm but strong. Posting it on social media, not so much.
Just curious whether any of you with kids still living at home have discussed this with them, like a dinnertime conversation. I wonder what their reaction is – not to whether Ashly has issues, but about using social media to resolve/publicize the situation. How would they feel if they had written a letter like Ashly’s – or even one less extreme – and discovered it was all over social media and in People magazine? Or if they wrote a tweet complaining about their roommate, do they expect it might end up on the local news?
As I’ve already said, I wish they could have kept it private. However – if the university refuses to respond, that’s when I do think it’s OK to turn to social media – because it’s clear that sometimes, that’s the only way to get large organizations to do anything. Although I still would have left out the roommate’s name, and perhaps not reprinted the entire email.
Yes. They say it’s an embarrassment to their generation. “Embarrassment to their generation” was not the phrase they used, however, but I can’t use stars to infer what they said, so use your imagination.
I think it is only fair to point out that the “ticking time bomb” phrase was preceded by “I’m also really chill too.” In my opinion, this mitigates the latter statement somewhat. Still inadvisable, but not quite the same impression without the qualification.
Nope, not for me. The juxtaposition of two mutually exclusive traits only makes the author look even more irrational. Never mind the absurd claim to be chill in the midst of acting in a manner that’s the exact opposite of chill.
