Amanda DeLuise

 

Winter is really bad for a lot of reasons: snow, wearing jackets, and everything and everyone gets sick, etc.

It started with my roommate getting the flu. No one warned me that when you’re in college, you and all the people you live with get sick simultaneously. I don’t even share a bathroom with the entire floor (I don’t know how people do that), but even sitting in the same small room with a sick person was enough to make me feel like shit.

I remember being at dinner on a Tuesday night and not being able to eat because my throat hurt. The next morning I couldn’t talk, couldn’t swallow, and could barely speak. So I went to the trusty health center at 8 in the morning so I wouldn’t have to wait an hour to see a nurse.

Instead I only had to wait half-an-hour. So I saw this nurse and he told me that I have some of the most swollen tonsils that he’d ever seen, a viral infection in my throat, and more post-nasal drip than he thought was possible. Yummy. So what did I do after the doctor? Duane Reade. I picked up Advil, Sudafed, Cepacol, Vitamins, Mucinex and NyQuil.

Then I had two classes and a midterm. Being sick at college is possibly the worst thing ever. Your professors don’t really care, you can’t sleep all day, you can’t experience the comfort of your own bed (at home), and your parents aren’t there to baby you.

Being sick used to not be so bad. You could miss a day of school, get all the work from one of your friends, watch TV all day. But now, sickness consists of classes and personal pharmesuetical cocktails and trying to muster up enough sleep to drag yourself out of bed the next morning.

In New York City, you have to be tight on security. At NYU residence halls, it’s no different. I live in the East Village with a lot of other students; and it’s harder to get into an NYU residence hall than it is to do my Calc homework.

Let me preface with a story about visiting my friend Sarah at Rutgers. I got to her building and someone leaving held the door open for me. I walked past an empty desk, where I assumed someone would be sitting because of the “GUEST SIGN-IN” clipboard, to the elevator – all without the assistance of an actual Rutgers student (minus the one who held the door for me).

At NYU, going inside is a process.

First of all, you need a valid and working NYU ID with a sticker on it indicating which residence hall you live in. Every time you enter a residence hall you have to swipe your ID and enter your birthday into the keypad. With the right birthday and a working ID, the turnstile unlocks and you enter into the elevator area – all of which is done in front of a 24-hour security guard.

This past weekend my friends Cait, Jeff, and Anthony visited (you can only have three guests at a time;they can only stay a maximum of three consecutive nights or six nights per-month, total). Every single time they entered my building they had to turn in their licenses/photo IDs to the guard, sign their names, and write my name, room number, and time of entry. The guard kept their IDs until they exited the building, where I signed them out. This process repeated whenever we entered or exited the building.

Tiring? Yeah. Repetitive? Yeah. Overkill? Probably not.

I see a lot of crazy people on the street (i.e., the man who fell through the Duane Reade window; the man who asks everyone if they want a penny, etc.), none of whom I would want wandering into my residence hall because of some absent-minded student holding the door open.