I started my first grad school class at Arizona State University on May 5. I graduated from the University of North Carolina on May 9. This doesn’t really add up for me, either.
But yes, now I am a member of the Arizona State University Masters of Education Class of 2012. The work is supposed to be kind of a joke, but if I’m gonna be 23 and have worked as a teacher for two years AND have a Master’s, mostly paid for on TFA’s dime, I’ll take it. And the state requires it to be a certified teacher, so that’s a pretty compelling reason, too.
I’ll be taking my classes at ASU’s downtown Phoenix campus, which is conveniently across the street from my swanky new apartment. But this summer I’m staying at the main campus in Tempe, in ASU’s dorms.
I haven’t lived in a dorm since sophomore year and I haven’t wanted to. If someone asked me last year what I would be doing this summer, I sure as hell wouldn’t have said that I would be living in a dorm in Tempe, Arizona.
As far as dorms go, Hassayampa is pretty nice; however, I think it was designed by a chronic drunk. Hallways abruptly end, as do stairways and elevators, which also are in the habit of getting stuck periodically. Doors lock and you can’t get back in them; the place is kind of like a fortress. To get into my room, I have to unlock six (SIX!) different doors. This cannot be safe in case of a fire.
Like I said, the building must have been designed by someone with substance abuse issues: two bedrooms share a bathroom, and that’s fine, except for that the bathroom locks from the inside and sometimes our suitemates forget to unlock our door (and sometimes we forget to unlock their door). So that periodically sucks.
I have a friend in the Corps who interned for the architectural firm that designed the building, and warned us before we moved in that it was an awful building. I should have believed him.
Also, ASU is on this “green” kick. This means that the water in the bathrooms is “low flow” in order to use less of it, and we and our suitemates have to share one air conditioning unit, which must be set at the same temperature for both rooms, and as someone who prefers to make my room a little icebox oasis in the Arizona desert, the room is almost invariably too hot.
Arizona is the opposite of Denmark; but they do have one thing in common: no trashcans. In their initiatives to “green” their respective domains, they place recycling bins everywhere. However, the remains of a Subway sandwich, for example, cannot be recycled, and thus I’m left with a smelly sandwich in my grad student bag.
Those are the worst things I hate about ASU and its campus, but there are a million things I love. One is the Tempe bar scene, and more on that to come, but one is also definitely ASU’s gym. I’ve never seen a larger fitness facility – it’s unreal. It has three pools, three massive weight rooms (one of which is outside – explain how that works), and about 75 cardio machines, maybe even more.
Of course all of this is fitting for being the largest school in the country, I mean ASU has to accommodate at least some of its 60,000 students, but I was impressed nonetheless.
The physical campus itself is also very pretty: manicured patches of desert dotted by saguaro and prickly pears dot the landscape. The buildings are also typical Arizona faux-adobe and the temperatures of icicles, and they have a Starbucks, a Burger King, AND a Taco Bell in their Union.
I miss Chapel Hill dearly; I miss the azaleas by South Building and the Old Well, and I miss laying out on the Quad, and I miss Franklin Street and the Carolina blue seats of the Dean Dome. I miss trips to Southpoint and I miss the Top O blueberry beer and blue cups at He’s Not.
But the transition was a lot easier to move out here to have such a great college and college town to come to.
peace and love from the grand canyon state,
pb
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