By Courtney VanAuken
Donner: the most notorious first-year building on campus. Defending Donner is a tough feat. Everyone has an idea of what they think Donner is, but not everyone has had the experience of living there. So just hear me out… It’s not that bad. If I lived in Mudge, I would have a fish pond. If I lived on Fifth, I would have a nice elevator and fancy mirrors in the hallway. If I lived on The Hill, I would have a massive ego. But I don’t live in any of those places. Let me tell you what I get from Donner.
Donner is the city that never sleeps. You can walk into any other dorm and it is a ghost town. Donner has common spaces that are actually utilized. You will rarely pass through the lobby without seeing a gaggle of students working or playing poker in the Fish Tank, or the ECE students tinkering with their toolboxes at all hours of the night — and I mean all hours of the night. Donner is one of the only housing communities at Carnegie Mellon that properly utilizes the community spaces. Feeling lonely? Go to the lounge. You will find a group of people to either talk with or eavesdrop on. You could find yourself giving dating advice to someone you’ve spoken less than 50 words to.
The Donner residents are characters, but isn’t that what you want out of a first-year dorming experience? Do you want to tell your children about your first-year of college and how normal your experience was? No. You want to tell them about how you would play pool in the Dungeon only to be met with a face full of dude ass. You want to tell them about the screams that echoed throughout the building, whether they came from the Donner Ditch or out of the Dungeon. (It becomes ambient after a while, you learn to love it.) You want to tell them about the first semester of college when the fire alarm went off just about every other day in the middle of the night (especially on the nights right before your 8 a.m. classes). You could be working in the lounge, only to be met with a student film crew shooting a flick starring a red bikini-topped masked murderer. That is just an average night at Donner.
Do you know what stories I have from other dorms? Hahaha… one time in Morewood I found out I couldn’t use the elevator to go downstairs since I didn’t have a resident key card! Hahaha! I had to use the stairs. That’s it. My friends visit Donner? They walk away with experiences. They see things they would never see in Henderson.
I consider myself to be a proud Donner Damsel In Distress. Is Donner the very thing that causes me so much distress? Yes. Especially when the front entrance is out of commission for over a week and the fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night. But if you allow yourself to accept and live with the distress, you become stronger for it. No matter how hard it tries, Donner hasn’t killed me yet. I wouldn’t have it any other way.