It was the night before the freshmen came and all through the halls, Undergraduates Advisers, Area Coordinators and Graduate Associates labored to decorate doors with construction paper and candy in preparation for the Office of Residential Life's second-annual Welcoming Day.
To the outsider last Friday, when all the freshmen dorms officially opened, the College probably seemed to be engrossed in an early Halloween fest. Upperclassmen ran around in costumes while greeting first-year students and their parents and showing them to their rooms.
Even upperclassmen not working with ORL were caught up in the fun and games and were envious. "It's so much nicer than when we were freshmen," Jennifer Mitchell '95 said as she conversed with a couple of first year students in Fayerweather Hall, which was turned into a Hollywood studio set. With more than 40 movie posters covering its walls, even the outside was decorated where signs reserving spaces for celebrities like Meryle Streep and Jack Nicholson were taped to the bike racks.
Besides the cast of characters, even the residence halls were dressed up. Most residential clusters looked unique because they followed different themes. The East Wheelock cluster became a Clue Mystery set. Rooms in its basement lounge became a wine cellar, Prof. Plum's study, a library and other rooms found on the Clue game board. Other clusters became hospitals, circus tents and haunted houses, but board games and the wild west were the most popular themes.
The Hyphen lounge located in Russell Sage and Halls became a life-size Monopoly board. Large chance and community chest cards describing the various student organizations on campus lined the walls of the halls. RipWoodSmith and the Gold Coast both decorated their dorms as the wild west.
In the Choates cluster, Rob Perkins '94, an UGA in Little, served root beer floats behind a checkered counter set up as a soda fountain, while the other UGAs and ACs ran around like the Thunderbirds and Pink Ladies from the movie "Grease." One freshman was even greeted by the group's rendition of the song Summer Love, by Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta.
Ed Tatman '97 said he liked the dorm decorations, especially the ones on the doors because of all the biographical information supplied on them.
"I liked it. They have names and hometowns on them so it helps you get to know people. And because I'm from Cleveland, when I see someone else is also from Cleveland, I'll pop in and say hi or something," he said.
The UGAs, ACs and Graduate Associates enjoyed the entertainment even more than the freshmen because it came at the end of an arduous week of training and workshops.
"I definitely thought all this was worth it," Gold Coast AC Mira Waldman '94 said. "The '94s and '95s all felt like we missed out. It also helped us unite as a staff. This is a big cluster and it helps give this cluster some unity."
Marcelino Garcia '94, an UGA in McLane, said, "We got to work together and gained a sense of community [during the training period]. And we hope a sense of that community will be kept alive here in the dorms."
Area Director of the east side of campus Scott Brown said the dorm themes were started because "we wanted to make this an exciting place to live and learn, instead of barracks where you dump your stuff and not come back."
Waldman said she thinks the freshmen all appreciated it. "It's a warming feeling to know people have prepared so much for you," she said.
But despite the amusement, everyone involved with the decorating and planning of the dorm themes were quite serious about their work after all, they were being judged by Dean of Residential Life Mary Turco and her associates Alison Keefe, Brown, Sharon La Voy and Junish Arora '94, ORL's administrative intern.
The ORL administrators went to every dorm that rainy Friday, looking for creativity, enthusiasm, best costumes, best use of props, best overall hall decorations and best employment of "frugality," Arora said half-jokingly.
Official winners were not declared at the end of the day. Turco said everyone was a winner that day because of all the hard work and everyone will be awarded a prize later this term at a dinner with Dean of Students Lee Pelton.
