Femme Hall Forever

When I first arrived on campus for move-in day, I discovered the room I’d chosen with my roommate was in the Femme Hall of Dascomb, the women-and-trans-only wing of the building. Before move-in, I’d vaguely known about Femme Hall’s existence, but not where it was in the building, and my roommate and I picked our room mostly based on proximity to the laundry room. 

Now, just a few short weeks before the end of the school year, I couldn’t be happier with where I ended up. 

First of all, I think Dascomb has the best location of all the first-year residence halls. I’m a humanities major, so pretty much all my classes are in the King Building, which is right next door to Dascomb. Dascomb is also very close to the conservatory, Wilder Hall (our student union),  and Oberlin’s main library, which are all places I visit almost every day. Plus, Wilder Bowl itself is a beautiful green space, and when it’s nice out, I love to study or eat lunch outside. The location alone makes living in Dascomb worth it. 

My room itself, too, is lovely—Dascomb has a ton of storage, with a whole wall of built-ins. I’ve made the most of my wall space with posters from the annual Poster Sale or events I’ve gone to, photos from home, crafts my friends have made me, and my Art Rental this semester, a gorgeous Reinhardt that looks much better in person than it does in pictures and matches the blue tones of the rest of my decor pretty much perfectly. 

That aside, though, the thing I love most about Dascomb and Femme Hall especially is the community. I know most of the names and faces of the other people in Femme Hall, but I’ve also made great friends. Like most people, when I started college I was really nervous about making friends, but I really didn’t need to be. I have met some of my favorite people and closest friends in the world in Femme Hall, and we’ve made incredible memories together throughout the year, from the first party we went to together to movie nights over Winter Term and late-night hallway conversations. One of my favorite things about Oberlin is the people, and I think I’ve found mine thanks to Femme Hall. 

Now that the year is winding down, I’m starting to think about packing up my dorm and moving out (a very daunting task), and I’m also thinking about ways to carry the community I’ve found in Femme Hall forward into next year. Next year, I’ll be living in Baldwin Cottage, one of Oberlin’s many Living-Learning Communities and Oberlin’s Women & Trans Collective house. I have a single (yay!), and I’ll be living with four of my Femme Hall friends, with several of my other friends living in the surrounding buildings. I’m excited to meet new people in Baldwin and hopefully make a new community, while holding onto my friends from the old. We’ve already started talking about how we’ll decorate our rooms next year and what we want to do together, so even though we might not all be living in the same hallway anymore, I feel confident that we’ll stay close. 

So, while dorm life is far from perfect—sometimes you’ll have loud neighbors or strange hallway smells for weeks on end, definitely not speaking from experience there—and putting yourself out there might seem as intimidating as packing up your entire room, it’s absolutely worth it to find your people, and I’m so happy that I did. As I say goodbye to Femme Hall and look towards next year in Baldwin, I couldn’t be more grateful for my first-year dorm, and I hope next year’s first-year class loves Femme Hall as much as I did.