Justin Blowers
The New Residence Hall is the incomplete “luxury” dorm on Troy University’s campus. While it was supposed to be finished in time for students to move in before the fall semester began, work still continues on many parts of the dorm.
Many things will stand out to someone who observes the dorm from the outside. The ongoing construction to build the back portion of the dorm is the most apparent of the many aesthetic problems. The grass seems to have been hastily thrown down to meet a completion date; it does not look healthy and has many dead patches.
Moving inside the dorm, the situation is mostly masked, but it remains the same. The tornado shelter, which has inexplicably appeared in place of the advertised 3-D theater, is filled with chairs that one can only assume will be put in the unfinished common area, the arch. The work on the arch seems to have made very little to no progress in the week that I have stayed here, and the inside work looks like it was not even started until very recently.
The finished portions of the dorm leave much to be desired from the $2,600 minimum price tag. The elevator for the men’s side feels like it’s an old one from Shackelford Hall or Clements Hall instead of being new. The most jarring issue is not the slipshod installation of the floorboards or showers, but the actual water itself. In a test done by my roommate and me, for three days we have filled a clean cup with shower and faucet water from the sink. Every test resulted in different-colored particles in the water. This is completely unacceptable for a dorm, new or otherwise.
Aside from the broken promises, the New Residence Hall has the potential to be great, but falls short in many aspects. In its current condition, the price tag on the dorm is too high for what we have been provided. Once the construction is completed and the other issues addressed, the dorm may meet the standard of the Trojan Way, but it currently fails to live up to the “luxury” it was advertised as.
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