This article is part of a larger project by The Michigan Daily News section’s Campus Life beat. Reporters spent time observing and interviewing students from various academic programs at the University of Michigan to share what their daily lives and academic experiences are like. Read the other stories here.
For many students, going to college can be intimidating, especially on a campus as large as the University of Michigan. For these students, the smaller setting of a living-learning community, usually in one of the residence halls, provides a place to meet students with similar interests and experience college with the support of a smaller community. The Daily met with students from three different Michigan Learning Communities and theme communities to learn what it is like to wake up and go to class all in the same building.
Sustainable Living Experience: Jesse Duby
As LSA freshman Jesse Duby unzips a tent in her dorm basement, steam escapes from the contained space, which contains dozens of white buckets with mushrooms illuminated by green LED lights. Wearing a mask, Duby carefully cuts off the matured mushrooms and weighs them on a scale nearby. After logging which mushrooms were harvested, she places them in a green bin and heads upstairs to take them to her dining hall.
This is a typical part of Duby’s day as a student in the Sustainable Living Experience, a living-learning community housed in the Oxford Residence Hall open to freshmen interested in engaging in sustainable lifestyle practices. Besides growing mushrooms for Twigs Dining Hall, Duby told The Michigan Daily in an interview that students have other responsibilities such as placing worms in vermicompost, watering plants, filling bird feeders and washing dishes in their communal kitchen.
“I usually come back here around 2:30 (and) check in on whatever chores I’m doing for the week,” Duby said. “Like this week, I’m on plant duty, so I was watering plants yesterday.”
Students in SLE are required to take a two-credit seminar, ENVIRON 155, where they collaborate on projects to improve the dorm and learn more about sustainability.
“I’m currently working on a project with making little terrariums for the common room,” Duby said. “We also have projects to start a flower garden outside in Oxford for people to enjoy. I believe they’re expanding on the vermicompost. Some classmates are working on a sustainable podcast … and then we’re also doing a sustainable book club.”
The course also aims to make students more aware of their consumption habits. Last semester, Duby said her classmates monitored their waste consumption for a week and then carried equivalent bags of trash around to visualize the amount they had used. This semester, students are conducting a similar activity with water use.
“Our project is to keep in mind how much water we use a week, and then (our professor) wants us to go down to the river in (Nichols Arboretum) and we’re supposed to carry up some water to the dorm,” Duby said. “We do a lot of little projects like that that are supposed to make us more mindful of what (resources) we use and how often we use them.”
Sustainable behaviors are encouraged in many aspects of SLE students’ daily lives. When Duby wakes up, she showers with a shampoo bar instead of liquid shampoo in a plastic bottle. If she has a hole in her shirt, she can participate in SLE-hosted mending workshops or use a permanent swap closet in the common area where students can donate clothes.
In the evenings, Duby said her SLE peers organize unofficial movie nights, or sometimes even late-night walks in Nichols Arboretum, the latter being one of her favorite aspects of SLE.
“A lot of the people in SLE and I, we like to do night walks in the Arb,” Duby said. “That can get terrifying really quick, but it’s really fun. The water is so pretty at night, especially the moon when it hits it just right. … It’s definitely worth being in SLE because you’re with a bunch of people who also enjoy that.”
Women in Science and Engineering Residence Program: Kaeya Patel
The Women in Science and Engineering Residence Program is a community founded on three tenets: building STEM efficacy, cultivating critical leadership skills and exploring identity in STEM. The program works to bring together female, female-identifying or non-binary students who are interested in majoring in STEM-related fields and to help foster a community in fields where these identities are not well represented.
Engineering sophomore Kaeya Patel is studying civil engineering and is a peer mentor with the WISE RP program. Patel said being a peer mentor has helped her know more members of her community and interact more with younger WISE RP members.
“Sometimes we’ll have to put on events,” Patel said. “So we get into peer mentor groups, and then we create events. And then the first-years have to go to two (of) those events. … I didn’t know every peer mentor that well, but I’ve gotten to know a lot of them very well. So I’ve made new friends, which has really been nice.”
On Fridays, Patel starts her day with a morning lecture on solid mechanics, CEE 212, followed by her Entrepreneurial Creativity class, or PSYCH 223. While Patel is busy with classes during most of the week, she only has two classes on Friday and has much of her afternoon free for her engineering club, the University of Michigan Steel Bridge Team.
The Steel Bridge Team is a group of 15 students who design, fabricate and build a strong miniature steel bridge during a competition against other schools. Once the bridge is completed, the bridge is tested for its sturdiness and strength and given a final score by a panel of judges. According to Patel, the competition has three stages of judgment: aesthetics, construction and strength. While the competition is held around the beginning of April, Patel said the designing process starts in the fall semester.
“We have the design team, which I was a part of as well, where we used 3D modeling online to construct an idea for the bridge,” Patel said. “Then the team captains order the steel, and then we move to the fabrication phase where members weld the steel together to create the bridge pieces. Once they are put together, we can move to the construction team.”
Patel has been working with the construction team since last year, when they advanced to nationals. The group meets about two to three times a week in the afternoon and gets materials from the Wilson Student Team Project Center. Patel said her role in the team involves watching over and timing the construction process.
“The practices usually last two hours as the group tries to build the bridge twice with hope of increasing speed each time,” Patel said. “I time the group, offer notes on how we can improve our speed while also making sure that we follow the rules.”
Patel said the WISE RP program has helped her both academically and in finding community.
“I’d say WISE (RP) has really helped me build a community and stem self-advocacy,” Patel said. “It was so nice to be able to talk to people about similar struggles, especially as a first year because we’re usually taking similar classes. The peer mentors are also great resources as they’ve taken similar classes before and even if they haven’t it’s still helpful to reach out and they can help to find someone who can help.”
Residential College: Ellen Mumford
The Residential College is a program within LSA located in East Quad Residence Hall. RC students attend classes within the building with relatively small class sizes. LSA freshman Ellen Mumford said in an interview with The Daily she thinks there were benefits to taking smaller classes in the RC.
“The professors always respond really quickly just because they have smaller classes and they know me by name,” Mumford said. “I am able to talk to them about their programs and things outside of class projects is really helpful.”
Mumford starts her day with ECON 101 in the morning. She then has about an hour and a half before she has to make it to her physical geology lecture, EARTH 119. Finally, she attends her course RCLANG 324, Spanish readings with the RC language program.
“I have my Spanish reading course on Women, Words and Images,” Mumford said. “In there, we’ll just discuss our readings, and it’s very discussion-based, so there’s not any lecturing in that class.”
The RC is known for its intensive language program that specializes in Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Russian. Typical intensive RC language classes are eight to 10 credits, and in order to be enrolled in a four-credit reading course, students must first pass a proficiency test required by the RC.
After her Spanish reading class, Mumford heads to her sociology course, where she spends her time doing school work while waiting for her discussion to begin. The discussion ends around 6 p.m., and after the discussion, she makes her way back to East Quad for dinner in the dining hall.
In the RC, Mumford is taking a forum for credit – the Food Forum – which she attends on Thursdays after dinner. Mumford said forums are unique to the RC; they are similar to clubs that meet once a week, and students can take them for up to one credit per semester.
“I’m in the Food Forum, which is once a week and we make some sort of dish or dessert in the community kitchen,” Mumford said. “It’s a good way to just talk with people and have good food once a week.”
Mumford said the advantages of participating in a living-learning community such as the RC were meeting new people and feeling more connected to a campus community.
“A lot of the living-learning communities seemed very accessible to get in and join and get involved with a lot of stuff and for me, RC just best matches my interest,” Mumford said. “I really liked the opportunity to (have) a smaller group. It’s nice to walk around the building and recognize people and be able to say hi to people.”
Daily Staff Reporter Audrey Shabelski can be reached at audres@umich.edu. Daily News Editor Astrid Code can be reached at astridc@umich.edu.