SDSU Students Deck the Walls for Dorm Year

Springsteen’s behind is settled in for the year. Garfield and Odie have found comfortable quarters. Tom and Kelly, riding the fame of the summer’s hottest movie, appear set for a ubiquitous autumn.

Classes at San Diego State University begin Tuesday, but the business of turning 15-by-12-foot rooms into yearlong homes for two people was under way Sunday for many of the 2,493 students who will occupy spaces in SDSU’s eight dormitories.

Confronted with “puke green” walls and “hospital” floors for the next nine months, some of SDSU’s residents have been working on the “residence halls”--as they are officially known--since they opened Thursday. Anxious to leave home, they are nevertheless anxious to take home with them.

That is accomplished by rearranging the standard-issue furniture--two beds, two desks, two dressers, two closets--to maximize space, and plastering the place with store-bought posters and mementos of families left behind.

“Anything you’d have at home to make it easier to swallow,” said Patty Drane, a senior who has settled on a teddy-bear motif for her single room in Zura Hall. Drane has posters of teddy bears on the walls. She has miniature teddy bears on the shelves. She has the real thing on the bed.

Indeed, a quick tour of some rooms on women’s halls in Zura and Tenochca dorms reveals that there should be no downturn in the stuffed-animal industry this fall. Jan Bredice has Elliot the elephant and Ziggy (of comic fame) in a nightshirt; Ann Baucom has Odie (of Garfield fame); Rosalia Lopez has a small zoo of stuffed friends sitting in a basket below six tiny yellow Garfields.

Lopez said she left behind a second suitcase stuffed with stuffed animals. She had no room in the car. (She also has a skull sitting atop her closet. “It was a gift. I like it up there,” she said.)

Scott Zippwald, a freshman from Lake Tahoe, despairing of his “puke green” walls, has begun a cover-up consisting of “ladies” and flyers from parties he has attended the past few days.

In Fernando Quintanar’s double room, the ambiance was decidedly heavy metal. Jimi Hendrix blasting from the stereo, Iron Maiden, the Who, the Doors, and Jimi again on the walls.

Though the rooms may be small and the halls of buildings that house up to 600 people can get noisy, freshmen and others often move into the dorms for the social life. Though less than 10% of SDSU’s 33,000 students live on campus, there are about two applicants for every space, said Marty Gruenthal, a resident adviser in Tenochca.

“If you live off campus, you don’t really get the full feel,” said Bredice, a freshman from Agoura Hills. “It’s really comfortable as long as you don’t overdo it with your stuff.”

Drane said, “It’s easier to get involved when all you have to do is roll out of bed and get to campus.” She is starting her third year in the dormitories and will help other students as a resident adviser.

“It’s the people that make this place go,” she said. “That’s the key. If people want to make this their home, it’ll go because everybody’s here.”