After waving goodbye to a friend, fourth-year College student Jenny Stein closed her window, hard. The screen fell out onto the grass below.
Now third-year College student Kiersten Kaufman knows why the screen was broken in her first-year dorm room, 304 Dabney.
The story behind the broken screen was only one revelation made during a series of reunions of first, second, third and fourth years who all lived in the same dorm room during their respective first years.
Kaufman and Stein, along with second-year College students Alice Kreiner and Leslie Lee and first-year College student Elizabeth Cairns, gathered in 304 Dabney to share stories from their first years.
The five gossiped like old friends, passing around pictures of the room when they lived in it and comparing their experiences. They took a reunion photo before everyone left.
Many of the stories had a lot in common.
Both Kaufman and Stein, for example, remember inebriated men puking in their water fountain.
And Kreiner, Kaufman and Stein all remember Easy Mac as the staple food of their first year.
"It was so good when it congealed," Stein recalled.
And all five remember their hall as a social place.
"We'd always have these deep conversations in
the hall," Stein said. "We did homework in the hall. We did everything in the hall."
"We'd always go out and do separate things, then reconvene at the end of the night and sit in the hall and talk," Kaufman agreed.
The guys who have lived in Dunnington 312 over the last four years have similar memories of suite unity, but more in the form of wrestling and playing tricks on each other.
Fourth-year College student Greg Hallmark remembered one incident in particular.
"The guys who lived in 311 kept IMing one of the guys in 313 with an unknown name and saying stuff like 'I see you,' and somebody in 313 thought they saw a laser pointer coming in from another building," Hallmark explained. "After like three hours of this the 311 guys came out and admitted it."
Almost all of the guys remembered slamming their furniture around, whether while wrestling or in order to get the attention of the girls downstairs.
"One time we were picking up the furniture and slamming it down to see if the girls would come upstairs, because they had in the past, and our RA happened to be in that suite passing out flyers, so we got in trouble," first-year College student Omar Wardak said.
Third-year College student Sam Sangobowale recalled similar incidents. "We'd always mess up the furniture in the suite, put the lamps in the bathrooms, and push the couches around," he said.
Hallmark and his roommate, fourth-year Commerce student Kevin Hammond, remember RAs coming up to their suite for a different reason.
"One of our suitemates was constantly having sex, and it was really loud," Hallmark said. "At one point at the end of the year, people from like five different suites came up to say 'You have to stop that, we're trying to study.'"
"There were five RAs in here, saying 'We can't take it anymore,'" Hammond added.
The former and current residents of Kent 212 had an even more interesting time sharing their memories because their hall has changed from girls to guys during the last four years.
Second-year College student Tom Duda said that the change explained something that had puzzled him and his hallmates throughout their first year.
"We didn't have any urinals in our bathrooms, and we always wondered what was up with that."
Still, the group found lots that they had in common.
First-year College student Bryant Knight complained about the heat that some pipes running up the wall behind his bed give off.
Duda remembered that problem well. "If you wake up and go to slap your alarm it sucks to hit those pipes," he said.
Fourth-year Commerce student Janine Vanzetta and her former roommate, fourth-year College student Jennifer Monroe, also had some heat problems their first year.
"It was Halloween night, and I was talking to this guy on the phone," Vanzetta said. "We had a light behind the bed, and I had my pillow up against the light, and all of a sudden I smelled something and Jennifer said, 'Your pillow's on fire.' She'd known for a half an hour and didn't say anything."
Duda's roommate never showed up his first year, so he had the entire room to himself.
"That's probably my favorite memory, that I had this place to myself," Duda said. "Although you always have your roommate to go to dinner with, or go work out with, and I didn't have that, but the guys on my hall were great."
In one instance, however, Duda's lack of a roommate got him into a tight spot.
"I came home one night and the guys from my hall were all waiting in here for me," he said. "They got duct tape and grabbed me and taped me down to my spare bed, and I didn't have a roommate to save me so I was struggling there for an hour. It was awful."
Not having a roommate also got him into trouble when he got locked out of his room the night before a term paper was due.
But he wasn't the only one to have problems with getting locked out of his room.
Knight accidentally closed the room door one morning when he and his roommate, first-year College student Ben Cullop, were both in the shower.
"It was on Sept. 11, so we were in our towels watching everything on TV," Knight said.
All five agreed that they enjoyed the other people on their halls.
"We had a stripper come to our hall for one girl's birthday," Monroe said.
"He brought himself and his gang members to play his backup music," Vanzetta added. "By the end he was all sweaty. It was so traumatizing. Jennifer and I were trying to hide so we wouldn't have to dance with him."
As Stein said, sharing memories of first year is a unique experience.
"There's so much weird stuff that happens first year that will never happen again in your life"
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