Courtesy of Claire Hloytak ’27
Whether you’ve been at Connecticut College for a semester or a few years, you’ve surely developed an opinion about the laundry situation in your dorm. Not enough machines, dryer too hot, dryer too cool, cycles too short, etc. But one problem seems consistent and persistent – people can’t seem to pick up their laundry when it’s done.
Lately, it seems my mailbox has been overrun with emails from my RAs on multiple floors asking us to please collect our (wet, dry, getting moldy) clothes from the laundry room. It’s become an epidemic. Students are leaving piles of washed clothes in laundry rooms across campus for weeks on end. In addition to inconveniencing the RAs who have to police this behavior, the bigger problem is that it also inconveniences those of us who politely check the laundry room every half hour to see if laundry has been removed from the dryer, or moved from the washer to dryer, before starting our own. I have often gone to put a load of laundry in, and revisited the room for hours only to find wet clothes still in the washer, delaying my laundry time.
I was wondering if this was specific to our college, so I did a little research. It turns out, we’re not alone. According to the American Cleaning Institute, 60% of first time college students arrive never having done a single load of laundry; 72% of first time college students say they feel unprepared for the responsibility of cleaning with laundry being their number one concern; and 49% of parents say they expect their kids to deal with laundry by bringing it home to be done.
Many of us live too far to even consider that, although I admit to taking a suitcase full of dirty laundry home for Thanksgiving. But my freshman year roommate had her mother drive to Conn every other week, pick up her laundry, and do it at the laundromat in New London.
I also remember hearing from friends numerous times over the course of my first year that the Hamilton fire alarm kept going off because some student didn’t know how to do their laundry properly, and it kept getting burned and setting the machine on fire.
All of this begs the question: Are you really ready for college if you can’t do your own laundry? As college students, we have earned the privilege of being here with the basic assumption that we know how to live respectfully in shared spaces. It’s not the job of an RA to remind us to pick up our laundry. Our RAs are there to guide us through more challenging situations, not to teach us basic life skills we should have already learned.
As we head into finals, let’s be mindful of the spaces we share, people’s belongings and time, and our RAs … and if anyone’s seen my blue polka dot sock, let me know (if you’re a fan of The Middle).
