If you have ever wanted to live in a building where you are either too hot or too cold at all times then the Charles River Apartments—also known as Grad—are right for you!
My experience living in Grad has honestly been worse than my experiences living in the two other dorms I have had at Brandeis, which, for reference, includes (a dingle in) East. While my Grad double has individual single rooms and a kitchen, the downsides far outweigh the positives.
I was given the worst placement in Grad in that I am surrounded by loud people on all sides except for my roommate. It definitely doesn’t help that the walls in Grad are practically paper, but I also seem to be in a position where the people surrounding me have little to no understanding of the fact that the walls are paper thin. This is awful in multiple ways. First, it sounds as though the people who live near me are living in my brain whenever they speak, which means I have pretty much no peace or quiet while in my dorm room. Additionally, if the person next to me does anything on their bed, that is against the same wall as mine, I can hear it like they’re in the same room as me. One night the person living next to me began crying and I could hear it clearly through the walls. While any person under normal circumstances would feel bad when hearing someone crying, my time in Grad has hardened me, and has made my neighbor’s emotions fuel for anger more than a reason for sympathy. This also obviously translates to my neighbor’s sexual situations which luckily for me—and unluckily for them—hasn’t happened many times since I moved into Grad.
I can also hear the person below me like they are the voice of God. Their voice echoes throughout the building underneath me and bounces up to my room in a spine-chilling fashion. Their laughs are like a sonic-boom and their phone conversations are long and painfully abundant.
My gripe with whoever built these buildings doesn’t end at its lack of sound-proofing. In addition, the windows in Grad are extremely drafty and lack any type of insulation that could prevent rooms from becoming freezing despite the heat being cranked up all the way. There also isn’t really a way for people to move their beds anywhere that isn’t against a wall of windows, so sitting on your bed while not under the covers is freezing. That on top of the fact that randomly the heat decides to work too well means I am either very cold or very hot while in my room. Also, the stairwells have no heat and for some reason people prop the door to my stairwell open often, even during the blizzard on Saturday!
Of course I also have to address how annoying it is that Grad is off campus. This normally wouldn’t be a problem since I have absolutely no attachment to being on campus whatsoever, but given the fact that the Branvan is often rarely on time and that the tracking on Branda is super flawed means this distance has become a problem. It isn’t uncommon for people who live in Grad to be late to places or to be forced to trek to campus no matter the weather just to get to class on time.
It wouldn’t be an article about hating Grad if I didn’t discuss the number of spiders in and around this complex. When I moved in I had to make sure I removed all the cobwebs surrounding where my bed would be, and look in every corner for the huge spiders that can be seen making homes in the windows during warmer months. I still am not sure if the spiders are better or worse than East’s stink bugs, but I guess at least spiders can’t fly.
I am grateful to be able to have housing, of course that is true, but based on the amount of money we are all spending on campus housing each semester we should not have to deal with such subpar accommodations. Grad, like East, needs to be seriously updated in order to make it a more enjoyable place for students to live, starting with actually building real walls and insulating the goddamn windows.
