My Adventures at Drew Begin (Part One)

For all (one) of you who have been eagerly awaiting my first post on my life at Drew, please accept my somewhat sincere apologies- it’s busy being a seminary student! Now that I can finally get into a routine, I’ll try to catch up in a few installments over the next couple days.

On the whole, my first week at Drew went the way that a standard incoming seminarian’s should: I moved into my room in the house that I’m sharing with four other people, met a couple of my housemates, and waited (patiently and sometimes not so patiently) for orientation to start.

When moving to a new place, simple thoughtfulness or thoughtlessness can make a world of difference. I’ll start with one negative example.

Melissa, my significant other, (and yes, I prefer that term to girlfriend, which sounds so fifteen to me, (with my apologies to all the fifteen year olds reading this blog)), had an awful time moving into Drew. Housing couldn’t find her a place to stay, and after finding her a room about two weeks later than they said they would, didn’t bother to send out housing forms and so gave her housing information only a week and a half before she was supposed to move in.

When she finally arrived, she found out that her apartment was filthy. Her dresser was missing a drawer (she only received a new one yesterday, after her third call to the Physical Plant Department), one room didn’t have a bed, and the entire place was unswept. The small kitchen was disgusting (it took me an hour and a half to clean five cupboards because of all the grime), the oven was unusable, and there was only one overhead light in the entire space, which meant that her room and the common area became unusably dark by 7:00PM.

This made her first few days at Drew unbearably stressful, as she had to worry about cleaning her apartment, harassing housing about sending furniture, trying to find lights for her room, moving in her belongings, starting orientation, and getting used to the foreign land of New Jersey.

I don’t believe that this lack of hospitality was intentional. However, it implies that Drew didn’t care enough about their students to make sure that their arrivals at Drew were as smooth as possible…(to be continued tomorrow)