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I lived in the dorms for my full freshman year at VT and my experience at Miles Hall was interesting to say the least. Over the time there, I had to deal with no AC in 90 degree weather, an absent roommate, a loud roommate, loud hallmates, many fire alarms, and even a small fire. The first semester my roommate was someone I knew from high school, although I wouldn’t say we were close friends. He was nice and respectful, a good roommate, but he wasn’t there most of the time. I liked how he kept it relatively clean, he wasn’t loud, and he was respectful of my space and my sleep schedule. He just wasn’t around a lot. He was out with his friends most of the time, sometimes falling asleep over at their dorms. There was even a time where he didn’t come back to the dorm for a full 3 days and I thought something happened to him. After the 1st semester he decided to transfer to a different college and I got paired with a random transfer student. He was completely different. He never left the dorm, and was extremely loud. He never respected me when I was trying to sleep, keeping all the lights on and screaming at his video games every night until 2 in the morning (when I would have an 8 am class 3 days of the week). He also never cleaned up after himself so our dorm looked like a mess until I decided to clean it up. That semester was also when COVID 19 came, so I had to move out after spring break. It was a blessing in disguise. Yes, covid came, which was bad, but at least I didn’t have to live with him anymore. My resident advisers for my dorm actually weren’t bad. The RA on my floor wasn’t very talkative, but he was very helpful when we had trouble or had suggestions for rules or additions to the common areas. The RA from the floor above mine was very friendly and hung out with the residents a lot. I still talk to him every once in a while to this day. Now, Miles is an all boys dorm, so you can imagine how crazy that is. A few complaints I had were how messy the kitchen and bathrooms were, but I don’t blame the staff/janitors, they tried their hardest to keep them clean but an all boys dorm is hard to maintain in terms of cleanliness. The last thing I have to talk about are the fire alarms. For some reason, half of the people in my dorm didn’t know how to microwave popcorn so almost all of the fire alarms from my building were because of burnt popcorn. Lots of these fire alarms happened to go off in the middle of the night. Although, one time we had an actual fire (a small one) from an RC car charger combusting. We weren’t allowed back in the building for a few hours. The hallway was black with soot, our box fans on the windows were also grey from the soot, and the whole building smelled like smoke for a week. Luckily no one got hurt, but it’s definitely something I’ll never forget. I made some really good friends there, and one of them is actually an RA there now. At first, I thought I would hate the dorms, but I’m actually really glad that I lived in them for the first year.
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