Today’s Washington University students enjoy memory foam mattresses in some dorms on the South 40 and eat fresh sushi for lunch at the Danforth University Center.

College life has changed markedly in the past few decades, according to Associate Dean of Students Jill Stratton, who has been at the University for 17 years.

Stratton said that for a long time, the University and other colleges focused many of their resources on graduate-level programs. This changed in the early 1990s, when the University and other schools began concentrating more on the undergraduate experience.

“A few places like Stanford and Washington University realized the heart and soul of our university are the undergraduates,” Stratton said.

Stratton, who teaches The Psychology of Young Adulthood at the University, said she believes that the quality of life enjoyed by students is essential to their success at the University. In her course, she discusses research that she said demonstrates a strong correlation between the happiness and fulfillment of students and their levels of academic success.

Sophomore Laura Zaim, who gives tours as part of the Student Activities Committee (SAC), said students today have a much different experience from their parents.

“[Today’s experience] has absolutely nothing to do with the college experience that our parents went through,” Zaim said. “I know when I give tours…parents are always remarking on…how there’s so much here that they didn’t have [and] can’t really imagine that they can [have here].”

Zaim said a large part of why the University offers some of its amenities to undergraduate students is today’s consumer culture.

“I think it’s become kind of like a consumer culture in that all these services are provided to us because we’re willing to pay for them. And [it helps] colleges to remain competitive,” Zaim said.

Stratton also emphasized the competitive edge offered by the University’s high quality of life.

“A lot of college campuses are paying more attention to the quality of life and students’ lives outside the classroom,” Stratton said. “But I think it’s one of our draws. I think we compare very well across the board.”

Residential facilities

Stratton said she has noticed a number of changes to the residential facilities on campus over the years, including 14 new buildings.

“The whole landscape has completely changed,” Stratton said.

Associate Director of Residential Life Joshua Walehwa has worked at the University since July 2003. In this time, he said he has seen the quality of residential facilities increase.

“We’ve added additional faculty families. We’ve strengthened our student engagement approach…We’ve improved safety and security and comfort levels,” he said. “Overall, we’ve just continued to try to be out there in front of other schools in the country in terms of trying to have a great residential life program.”

Additionally, the purpose behind residential facilities has altered, according to Stratton.

“Back in the day, [residential facilities were] just the concrete cinderblocks,” Stratton said. “Now, it’s where we live and learn. It’s about the quality of our whole lives.”

Dining facilities

Although Nadeem Siddiqui, resident district manager for Bon Appétit, is relatively new to the University, he said he has already seen dramatic changes in campus dining, including the construction of the new South 40 dining facility.

“Two years in a row, I will have the advantage of helping to redefine and adjust the dining program to help students have a better quality experience,” Siddiqui said.

The University hasn’t always had the high quality dining services that it currently has.

“We have all this healthy organic stuff that helps us live better lives, and back then it was like, ‘Here’s some cold pizza,’” sophomore Jessica Frank said.

Siddiqui said he believes changes in dining services are more recent.

“I think it has taken some years to refine [the campus dining situation]. I think the last several years it has been rated among the top living parts of the University,” Siddiqui said.

Siddiqui said he believes the University’s dining options are superior to those of comparable institutions, due in large part to the longer hours of service and the unique types of food provided. Siddiqui, who previously worked at Cornell and Stanford universities, claimed that when the South 40 facility is complete, the University’s dining system will be “one of the top programs in the nation.”

“We want a place that is comfortable and warm where students can come together with faculty and staff to learn,” he said. “Food is a magnet that brings people together.”

Getting up wasn’t quite as easy as I had anticipated. Still scrunched in hammock posture, I tried to swing my legs over the side and climb off, but every way I moved, I turned the ropes in some ridiculous angle that made my escape impossible. I finally wound up falling flat on my derrière, gaining a dirty pair of jeans and sore tailbone in the process.

Sometimes it hurts to climb out of a comfortable place to a new one, but just as often, it is completely worth it.

My rendezvous with gravity and ancient Greece pulled my attention to memories of graduation and move-in day at Wash. U. People told me college was a place where I could be different. I could redefine myself, go from passive to assertive, timid to bold, apathetic to passionate, insecure to confident or the reverse of any of those, if I so desired.

I had a chance to transform who I was into the person I wanted to be, everyone told me, and I had every intention to do so. They didn’t tell me how hard it was going to be.

I have a tendency to be a little quieter than I’d like at times, to the extent that I don’t even express my opinion. Coming to a place where I wasn’t known as the guy to whom everyone tells their problems and who is too nice to yell at someone if they make him angry seemed like a great opportunity. I was merely a blank slate, ready to define itself according to its own terms, which is quite a refreshing and invigorating thought. I was tired of being a doormat.

Like being in the hammock, though, all I wanted to do was lie there idly and enjoy the smell of almost-autumn, clutching in my hand the toxic tome that I had learned to hate silently. Yes, it was comfortable; yes, the weather was nice, but still, “The Republic” was on top of me, its dialogues an oppressive force on my chest.

I felt similar sentiments about my compliance and whom I thought everyone else thought I was supposed to be. I have slowly developed into this person over the past 13 years, becoming diplomatic, polite, silent, saying that people wouldn’t care to hear what I had to say or that some remark was too sarcastic to actually say aloud. This attitude transformed from some convention into how I defined myself and the bed in which I lay, and a comfortable, well-shaded one at that. But still, the sting of something I hated remained in my arms, required reading for how I should think about justice and the perfect society.

Society isn’t perfect, and neither am I. While talking to a good friend about this a few chilly nights ago, she told me that I just needed to stop worrying about how everyone would perceive me and just be who I want to be, which I found quite a shock, really. Through the shivers and lamplight, I had to physically stop and examine who I wanted to be.

I think oftentimes we get so caught up with fear of how others feel about us that we stay in these molds that we, not they, think define us. It becomes our mask, our safety, our name, and we refuse to be anything more or try anything else. After all, if the breeze is blowing, who cares how many pages of ridiculous philosophy we have to read? We can’t spend our entire life in the same place because we’re too comfortable or too afraid of looking like an idiot when we try to get out. We have to get out and go further.

Yes, I hurt my butt and got dirt on my jeans and possibly made a fool of myself in front of my entire building, but when I dusted myself off and headed to the Loop, I realized that walking, unimpeded by ropes, made me so much happier.

This is not to say that my job sucked, because it really didn’t. I had my own cubicle, I worked on quite a few interesting projects and hopefully, if I filled out the paperwork right, I’ll get some credit. Overall my summer internship was very summer internship-y. I was exposed to the world of the working man and woman, and I can’t say that the world of the working stiff tickled my intellectual fancies. It felt great to be productive, and somehow the responsibility of working upped my emotional age to that of a toddler who just finished teething, but that just wasn’t really satisfying. I can confidently say that being back at school for a week has totally reversed the effects that a job had on my mental age. It’s kind of like a Benjamin Button complex.
The bottom line is that I really prefer my life at college. Waking up at eight in the morning and making the trek downtown to the office doesn’t really compare to rolling out of bed at eleven and right into your first class. This whole idea is terribly clichéd, but it took me until the beginning of sophomore year to realize how great college life really is. Everyone always talks about how important it is to get out of the Wash. U. bubble, and it is, but it’s equally important to immerse yourself in it. There will never be another time in your life when you can customize your existence to the extent that you can here. We can choose who we live with, where we live, what we learn (or don’t learn), when we do that learning and really, most importantly, which party we’re going to tonight.

I do realize that the motivation behind this article is sickeningly cheesy, but if you look deeply into the heart of my argument, I really am sticking it to the man. The ‘man’ being real life. Given the ridiculous extent of my hypocrisy, I’ll probably write an article in four months telling you that we have to stick it to the man, except that in the future, the man will be Wash. U. So now that I’ve totally negated my initial points, I’ll say goodbye and wish you all (especially freshman) a great start to the year. Happy partying.