4th West: A True Story of a Former College Student

Introduction

Everything I am today I can honestly say can be attributed to my past life as a college student. Even though I've been away from school for about 10 years now, I still have quite a few memories and life lessons that I carry with me.

Ironically, most of those lessons were learned my freshman year from the people I came to know in the dorm wing named "4^th West."

I went to a small college in northern Wisconsin near the Minnesota border. It was often referred to as a suit-case college because most of the students lived within an hour's drive and went home on weekends. I, of course, was not one of those students; my home was roughly 4 hours away and I only left on holidays.

I eventually plan on sharing many of my adventures with you but, to get things started, it's best to start with my first day at school.

The dorm rooms in 4^th West were about the size of your average bedroom. Only you had to share it with another student and had to share a bathroom down the hall with the rest of the wing. The dorm hall had four floors and 8 wings labeled east or west; hence the name 4^th West (because we were on the fourth floor on the west side of the building).

My room and roommate were randomly picked and the hardest part about moving away from home turned out to be the moving part. The dorm was an older dorm and didn't have an elevator so everything from my clothes to my microwave had to be lugged up several flights of steps.

I didn't meet my roommate, Jason, a junior, until my second night at the dorm. Like I mentioned before, roommates at the time were randomly picked on two simple criteria; gender and whether they smoked. Jason was a guy, just like me and he didn't smoke. That's the extent of what we had in common. I was a morning person; usually up at the crack of dawn. He wasn't. He drank, I didn't. He liked having a lot of company over, I was a quiet person who preferred to keep to myself. In other words, this wasn't a good match up.