Quad Life by Connie H. '15

I was confused when I was put into a room with three strangers at the beginning of this year. Two of the girls I had heard about in a very roundabout way, and the third I approached awkwardly when everyone had already paired up for their room assignments within Baker.

“Want to be my roommate?”
“Yeah, sure.”

Liz and I filled out our rooming forms together — single sided sheets of paper with prompts like “Who do you want to live with?” and “Tell us something funny, we read a lot of these!”

It seemed to go pretty smoothly until she brought up that she would be waking up for crew practice diligently at 6am every day. Crap.

Not my ideal start to the year.

A lot of people wonder what it’s like living in a quad — four girls in a glorious 500-something square foot room furnished with two sinks, huge windows facing the river, and just enough space to house our joint collection of shoes, sweaters, shampoo and study fuel (AKA our weight in ramen and hello panda) — and it’s not easy to describe. (For those of you worried about getting put in a quad, there are only 10 on campus, all located in Baker House. Don’t sweat it!)

The year got off to a rocky start. I never quite recovered from Nicole claiming the first bed with a bag of grapes — turns out they weren’t even hers — or realizing that at any point in time, someone in our room was rustling and some degree of awake.

You might ask how we’ve made it so far into the year without any issues, and all I can say is that we figured out how to be friends. Fancy that!

Our room is best described by the little signs that we leave that we’ve learned to read throughout the year. We know that someone’s had a bad day when there’s the faithful five ounce bag of honey barbeque Fritos in our trash can that someone grabbed at LaVerde’s on the way back from class. We know that when we try not to turn on the lights and end up walking into rain boots, a swiffer, an iron pot, a laundry basket, two chairs and a lamp, all we really want to do is fall into bed and sleep and we’re sorry that we made more noise than a street drummer. And we know that even after our good days, all we want to do is eat dinner at 5:30 on the dot because we missed lunch and we can’t wait to order sweet potato fries and indulge in an occasional 0% fruit juice beverage of our choice (okay, it’s HI-C, I admit it!)

Before the 8.01 final last fall — from the left, me, Nicole, and Anji looking particularly cheery…

And we’re happy when we’re all in the room so we can laugh at bad YouTube videos, whatshouldtimcallme.tumblr.com, get ready to go out at night, or just stay in to karaoke at the top of our lungs and paint our nails. Our weeks start with a collective sigh Monday morning, and by the time our psets are finished by Friday we perk up and get ready for the weekend! Together we’re good at solving life problems, boy problems, and differential equation problems.

In the past 8 months we’ve constructed a little home and a little family. I’ll omit pictures of our room because it looks like we took four model room sets from Target, tetrised them all into a funny shaped brick room, and then transported the toiletries and school supplies section of Walmart and scattered it on our beds, tables, shelves and floors… oops.

Dressed up with Anji and Liz for winter fraternity formals (left) and with Liz for spring fraternity formals (right)!

And for all the accidental wake-ups, stuff everywhere, running around the room late for class, I’m sure as hell going to miss what we have in Baker 446.

My wall — one of the few orderly things in our room…

… Good thing we’re living in doubles in Baker next to each other next year! :)

Thanks Liz, Nicole and Anji for an amazing year. You guys are the best roommates I ever could’ve asked for, and then some.