An open letter to the department of housing

Dear Undergraduate Housing Department:

First of all, I just want to say thank you. I really appreciate that you took me off the wait list and gave me such a lovely room, even if I only found out about it several weeks after all the freshmen had their housing assignments (and had found themselves several hundred "friends" on thefacebook.com). But it's nice, it really is, and it definitely beats that tent my draw group and I were planning on pitching in the middle of the junior slums.

But even though all my friends are now saying "I told you so" (meaning "I told you that being on the wait list is a sweet deal and I wish you would have shut up with your talking about pitching a tent in the middle of the junior slums"), and even though I know I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, I need to express some lingering concerns regarding how you guys treat Princeton students.

I'm not going to rant about the general pitfalls of moving; I'm sure you've all moved houses, apartments or perhaps even yurts in your life. But would you, say, feel more than slightly put out if you had a final that coincided with the last day you were allowed to move out of your room — meaning you had at most an afternoon to pack up the entire contents of your room and put it in storage? Or what if you were told you had to leave your summer housing room on a certain day but found out that your school year room was still being used by a summer camp (in no way affiliated with the University)? I'm going to hazard a guess that you would be less than tickled.

These are just a couple of the fun experiences that either I, or someone I know at Princeton, have been through at least once. Now I know it must be hard work to ensure that all 4,600-plus students have roofs over their heads and a bathroom no farther than a floor away. And as I was informed by D. Scott Young, the frequently condescending "mouth" of the Housing Department, I also know that Lisa DePaul, Assistant Director of Housing, is a very busy women who "receives hundreds of emails every day." When I contacted her over the summer to ask a fairly pressing question about a moving problem, she could not be reached to answer my several emails and phone calls until my irate father took action and emailed her himself.

But Ms. DePaul, despite her hectic schedule, was more than capable of emailing me back within a day when I sent her an email titled "Daily Princetonian Interview?," though she did not want to commit to an interview any time soon.

While I recognize that I live in an orange bubble cum ivory tower and my parents finance my education, I still believe that the goal of a university like Princeton is to allow us to grow both as thinkers and as young adults. It's for this reason that I wish that Ms. DePaul and the housing department representatives with whom I have interacted would have enough professionalism in general — and respect for me and my fellow students, in particular — to actually email us back when we have a question or problem.

Right now, Undergraduate Housing Department, I've got all these bruises on me. It sort of looks like my boyfriend has been beating me, but, as I am only too painfully aware, I don't have a boyfriend. While the obvious spots are from the usual pain of moving in, the bruises go deeper than the damage done while trying to move my fridge across the campus as it slowly defrosted itself on my pants. You may get to disperse to your homes at the end of the day but for the rest of us, Princeton is our home. Yes, it's a home we have to recreate every year and where we feel lucky if we can get 150 square feet to call our own. But it's still our home and, email answering or not-answering aside, I'm not sure if you guys really appreciate that. Cailey Hall is an English major from Los Angeles, Calif. She can be reached at schall@princeton.edu.