Every living area has a different stigma attached to it. Southwest is party central, Northeast is quiet, Central is for the “hippies,” and Sylvan is the mental hospital of the campus. And then there’s Orchard Hill; home of the Commonwealth College and mean, snobby people. Supposedly Orchard Hill is a quiet place because the students are too busy studying and playing Snood to go out and be social. Most of the ideas people have about Orchard Hill are sadly very negative, specifically of the types of students that live here. Being a resident of Orchard Hill, I think I need to put up some arguments in defense of myself and my neighbors.

I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to live on Orchard Hill. I think the rooms are the nicest you can get on campus and generally people are pleasant. The majority of the people I have met on the hill are nice, with the exception of a few. It only takes a few people to create a stereotype and unfortunately only the snobs that live there have created it. This image includes the idea that the elitist idea that Commonwealth College students are more entitled to things than non-honors students by virtue of intellectual superiority. I completely disagree with this and many of my friends in Commonwealth College do too.

I think students on the Hill tend to be more respectful of each other. It’s a rare occasion to find vomit in the hallways because the majority of people actually make it to the bathroom or will clean it up. Students open doors for each other and hold the elevator frequently too. I’ve also never seen video cameras at an Orchard Hill event, which I think is a really interesting observation. Unfortunately there are students on this campus who videotape things such as Northeast streak weekend and riots in Southwest and then proudly post them on the Internet for the world to see. First of all, it’s exploiting your fellow students, especially if they’re doing something incriminating while under the influence of alcohol. Ladies, if you’ve ever flashed or streaked publicly while at UMass, I suggest you think twice next

time; your image could be on the campus network or even worse, the world wide web, where more people have access to it to hurt you. Those images can be downloaded and used again for possibly worse reasons.

It’s ironic how students in Southwest oppose having video cameras as a surveillance mechanism, when other students are videotaping the riots, putting them on the network or the web, and essentially showing UMPD better images than its camera did. While the surveillance camera shows you burning a couch from overhead, your neighbor from down the hall got a close up of you with lighter in hand. Secondly, putting these images on the Internet creates even more bad images of the UMass community. There is enough bad publicity about the student body without having students posting photos and images of each other drunk for people outside the campus to see.

One of the greatest accomplishments of Orchard Hill is the amount of student leaders that emerge from this area. There are a ton of students that are from Orchard Hill who are involved on campus through various organizations, whether it be music, intramurals or registered student organizations. Students from the Hill are actively contributing to the University in their own way, which is essential to student life, especially in the student senate. Every year, senate seats and area government seats are actually contested, where in other living areas many students run unopposed. From my frame of reference many commuter senators or commuters students who are actively involved on campus are formerly from the

Hill. Orchard Hill Area Government (OHAG) has always been an exceptional area government, even through the tides of change as people graduate and new students take over. The OHAG office has its own copying machine open to resident use, exchanges money for quarters for laundry and hosts events on a regular basis.

Another big myth about the Hill is that the honors students are always studying and are very quiet people. As somebody who lives directly under a Commonwealth College learning community, this is a complete lie. The freshmen that live above me are incredibly noisy! It’s not even just the room above me, but the entire wing. A few of my neighbors have also heard the noise, which includes moving furniture, basketballs, slamming doors and running. There are also many other loud unidentifiable noises that sound like explosions, which loosen the Christmas lights around my room. Apparently, students on the floor above them are also hearing the cacophony and ready to kill. When finals begin, the whole situation could get very ugly.

The honors students and non-honors students on the Hill also know how to party, contrary to popular belief. The Hill gets very noisy starting with Thirsty Thursday and continuing into Saturday night when it quiets down a bit. Students have parties on the Hill, they go to other parts of campus and they go into town looking for fun. There are also many students who go along with the stereotype and do spend their weekends doing alternative things such as play Snood and watch movies in their own rooms, but tell me what’s wrong with that? Everyone has different tastes and interests and if playing Starcraft in your dorm is your idea of fun, then I’m not about to discriminate. People talk about students isolating themselves as if it were a bad thing, when in reality it’s just a matter of choice.

People often compare Orchard Hill to our polar opposite Southwest, but there are clear reasons why the Hill is better. For example, power outages. If another large power outage were to occur campus wide that lasted under five minutes, the students on Orchard Hill would be upset (especially if you just lost that paper you were finishing) but fairly calm. In

Southwest, furniture would have been set on fire, hundreds of beer bottles thrown out windows and unnecessary rioting would happen. It’s a power outage for crying out loud. The electricity will come back and students on Orchard Hill know this. In Southwest they’re rioting for the sake of rioting. In terms of furniture I will acknowledge that students on Orchard Hill have this obsession with throwing couches off the balconies. Most of the sturdy couches survive the fall and magically appear in our lounges again. Though impractical, we keep our furniture, whereas in Southwest once it’s charred sufficiently that couch is done. Orchard Hill buildings only have seven floors and the elevators stop at all of them, whereas Southwest elevators don’t stop on every floor, making moving day painful and waiting longer. This battle could continue on forever between the living areas, and I hope no one was too offended. I have a lot of good friends in Southwest, though I personally would never actually live there. Orchard Hill is great and

I’m proud to say that I live there (but I’m not an honors student. I always make that very clear to possible haters). The Hill and the students that live

there are a lot better than people perceive it to be.