Older colleges not meeting Rice's standard of living
Rice University is known for offering the best quality of life to its undergraduate students. Students admitted to Rice pay up to $34,900 on tuition and about $12,000 on room and board annually. While Rice has upheld its standard of living in most colleges across campus, some of the older colleges are severely lacking, namely Hanszen College.
The dorms at Hanszen are arguably some of the worse on campus. The doors and walls are warped. The air conditioning vents in new section only have two settings: off or on, with no control over the actual temperature of the room. There are constant roaches crawling into the rooms and mold has made its face known. Last semester, students living in new section had a damaged door and could see inside the doorframe. What they saw was a blanket of mold spread throughout the inside of structure. Although Housing and Dining is great about fixing small problems, the number of problems reported causes a lag in the time it takes to care for the bigger problems. Thus, in September of 2011, the students called in the Bureau of Pollution Control and Prevention to step in. The bureau couldn't help the students because there weren't enough complaints. The students were forced to move to Duncan College (last semester). I'm curious about how much mold is actually growing, hidden within our walls and floors of Hanszen.
The worst problem that Hanszen students have to face is the threat of rats and mice finding their way into our rooms and leaving their droppings in and around our beds. Last year, two students at Hanszen had to find alternative sleeping arrangements by sleeping in a friend's dorm or on a random couch, to avoid the rats that kept finding their way into their rooms. The rat problems made living conditions dangerous to the students' health.
H&D tried to terminate the rats, but they still appeared in our stairwells. Just a couple of weeks ago, a student was climbing up the stairs in Hanszen new section's tower, and a rat flung itself at her face from the landing above. Rats carry a number of diseases and are a harm to students, yet we are forced to face them all too frequently.
H&D has done all it can do, but most of the fixes are temporary. They tried leaving mousetraps and cleaning the mold. They have also allowed students to start painting their rooms to try and liven up the space. However, no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it will still be a pig.
It is an honor to be part of the set of traditions the college offers, but students living in the older dorms are at a disadvantage, especially when they are paying the same room fees as students in better-maintained colleges such as Martel College or Wiess College.
The housing problems do not stop at Hanszen; there have been reports of possums finding their way into the Lovett College rooms. The living conditions are grotesque in the older colleges and need to be taken care of. Rice plans on reconstructing Hanszen's new section in the next five or seven years, but what until then? Students are paying thousands of dollars to live on campus, but are short changed if they live in Hanszen, or any of the older colleges that have not been cared for in far too long. Rice housing should set a standard for the quality of its colleges; right now, Hanszen is far from meeting that standard. Theresa Masciale is a Hanszen College sophomore.
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