Nothing could have prepared Penn State students for pandemic learning. Spending long hours in front of your laptop listening to Zoom lectures without leaving your room for the entire day can make anyone’s eyes glaze over.
However, some freshmen tried to lift their spirits by decorating their dorm rooms to make them a little easier to look at during the day.
Ellie Dunleavy began to plan her dorm room decorations for this year as soon as she signed her housing contract.
“I was so excited because, for me, I knew that it was going to be the space that I was in for a long time,” Dunleavy (freshman-physics) said. “I knew I was going to have to be in there every single day doing classes… so I wanted to create a space that I knew I was going to enjoy being in if it was going to be such a huge part of my life.”
Dunleavy, who is originally from Bermuda, created a space filled with photographs of her and her friends laughing on the beach, which she squeezed between psychedelic pink and orange posters from Redbubble. She tried to translate her love for the ocean and all things water-related onto the walls to remind her of her home in Bermuda.
“I wanted to remember all my friends because I didn’t know anyone else at Penn State when I was leaving,” Dunleavy said. “I’m the only person in my school who came here… and I had an amazing summer before I left, so I wanted to definitely keep that in my heart.”
Now, Dunleavy is looking forward to hanging up photographs of the new friends she made at Penn State — including her roommate — once she gets back to her dorm room.
Ava Klink had no idea Dunleavy would be her roommate this year, but luckily their decorative ideas weren’t too far off from each other.
Klink (freshman-environmental resource management) loves traveling and the outdoors, so she adorned her walls with photographs and posters of locations she has visited and the places she hopes to go to one day. She has images of Iceland, Yellowstone National Park and Hawaii plastered above her bed to remind her of fun family vacations and her first adventures.
“Hawaii is a great spot for environmental science, so it is interesting to look at it while I’m taking my classes — my virtual classes — in my dorm,” Klink said.
Klink used the website Dormify to help her organize her room decorations before she came to Penn State.
“It’s just a website [that] has a lot of dorm decor, and that’s where I got my bedding, too,” Klink said. “It just makes it pretty easy. You can envision what you want everything to look like and it will build it for you.”
Klink said Dormify makes it easier for incoming freshmen to decide how to decorate their dorms when they have no idea where to begin.
By using Dormify and Amazon, Klink found room decor that reflected her personality and interests.
However, Anna Gillard and Casey Webb have been close friends since high school and knew exactly how they wanted to coordinate their dorm at Penn State.
By using a Tezza Collage Kit for their walls, which consists of about 150 retro prints, Gillard (freshman-data science) and Webb (freshman-veterinary and biomedical sciences) transformed their “ugly,” unrenovated East Halls dorm room into a bright and fun atmosphere. Their inspiration for decor came directly from Pinterest.
“I love Pinterest,” Webb said. “It’s my favorite social media app. I am always on there.”
With help from social media and room decor websites, these freshmen were able to make the most of their virtual first year of college by turning their dorm rooms into oases away from the coronavirus pandemic’s chaos.
“Definitely try to make it a place that reminds you of home and the people that you love,” Dunleavy said. “It’s really nice to roll over in bed in the morning, and I look right at my friends. All these people love me, [and] I love them. It puts me in a good mood as soon as I look at it, because I know that I’m supported. I have all these people in my life, and it makes me really grateful.”
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