Our group of second-year Journalism – Mass Media students from Durham College have tackled a special project – one we are calling ’24 Hours DC/UOIT’.
On Feb. 5, 2019, the students visited particular areas of the Durham College and UOIT campuses, including north Oshawa, downtown Oshawa and Whitby.
They talked to people, snapped pictures and gathered stories from students, faculty and staff about their campus experiences. This is one in a series of 16 stories from that day.
She’s been stuck in an elevator during a fire alarm – and received a noise complaint for arguing over the television show The Bachelor.
Mandy Yim is well-versed on the interesting moments around life in residence.
The first-year 911 Emergency and Call Centre Communications student from Toronto, lives in South Village Residence and attends classes at Durham College (DC).
“Everyone is kind of jumbled,” she says. “We have Trent students, UOIT and Durham College here.”
The building is located on the southwest corner of campus, includes a dining hall and is adjacent to forests and a pond.
“It’s a pretty nice view,” she says, looking out from her fifth floor dorm window.
The view comes with a price. Yim says it’s expensive living on residence and her meal plan alone costs $5,000. Overall, depending on location and options, students can spend about $7,500 for a year in residence.
Yim walks to the Shoppers Drug Mart across from campus regularly with her friends to supplement the food options available in the dining hall.
“Chips, candies, a lot of Annie’s mac and cheese, noodles, bread,” Yim says of her regular purchases. If she treks to NoFrills and Walmart, “it’s a day trip.”
During the day, Yim says there isn’t much noise because students are in class. But when the sun goes down, Yim says tenants in the building become active.
“At night is when you really start to hear a lot of things,” she says. “On this floor, we have people who run. We have a group of people who play tag on this floor, around 10 p.m.-ish, sometimes 11 p.m.”
Yim also becomes active in the evenings, running tracks of her own, playing music to relieve stress weeknights.
“We had dance parties, we’d blast music. It was 11:30 p.m. and we didn’t have noise complaints but we had a song request chart outside of our door and that’s what we got busted for,” she says. “The RA’s [Resident Advisors] are pretty chill with the noise.”
RA Jamie Chan calls the fifth floor of South Village the “party” floor. She’s a first-year Networking and IT Security student at UOIT and dealt with a residence violation last semester.
“Some residents brought out a whole table to play beer pong outside in the middle of the hallway,” Chan says. “Drinking games are banned here. It was pretty funny having to shut that down.”
Despite the wild stories, Yim says the best thing about residence is developing friendships.
“I remember me and my roommate, we knocked on people’s doors and [one of] the doors that we knocked on, they ended up being one of our closest friends,” she says. “I think living on res has changed me. I’ve gotten a lot more involved.”
Chan agrees. She’s learned to be more extroverted because of her RA position.
“My boss told me something that stuck with me,” she explains. “It’s the fact that our comfort zone is almost like a rubber band. It gets stretched every time but it never decompresses so your comfort zone grows and grows. [When you live on residence] you grow as a person.”
