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Heat affects move-in day

Students and parents bear 100-degree heat

By Sarah Neff

Thursday, August 16, 2007

The parking lots in front of the dorms on Daisy Hill were filled with moving vans, SUVs, boxes, furniture and students with their parents on Sunday.

This year, the housing department decided to change the move-in time from 8 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. to give students a chance to move in before the heat of the day set in.

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Photo by Dani Marvin

Brynn Hamlett, Garden City freshmen, and her family are taking things to her dorm room in Ellsworth Hall on Sunday.

Shanna Doering, Mulvane senior and resident assistant at Hashinger Hall, said she got up at 6 a.m. to get ready to help new residents check in.

“A lot of people have been taking advantage of the cooler hours,” Doering said.

Roger and Leslie Williams, parents of Hunter Williams, Shawnee freshman, arrived for the move in around 8 a.m. They weren’t scheduled to move in until 2 p.m.

Hunter said he was excited about moving.

“I’m probably forgetting something though,” Hunter said. “But I guess that’s normal.”

Hunter is first child in the Williams family to go away to college, and Roger said the feeling was bittersweet.

“It’s a big step and a lot of preparation, but you never know if it’s enough,” Roger said. “It’s important they work things out for themselves and this is a good time for them to start.”

Leslie said she was excited, but she was also having some mixed feelings.

“I can’t stop and think about it very much because I get emotional,” Leslie said.

Tents were set up for the parents to rest. Ice troughs placed at rest areas and in front of residence halls were filled with water and soda to refresh the movers. There was a student in a giant banana suit handing out smoothie samples in front of Pulse coffee shop. The parents waited in the parking lot with boxes stacked high while the students checked in at their residence halls.

Diana Robertson, director of Student Housing, said people were waiting to move in at 6 a.m., and once they opened the doors there was a steady stream the rest of the day.

She said her department doesn’t plan to move the time permanently, but in the future if the August moving weekend falls on an excessively hot day they would change the time again.

“Quite a few people took advantage of it and we got a lot of really nice positive feedback,” Robertson said. “But it was a really long day for the staff.”

The students moving into Jayhawker Towers on Friday and the sorority recruits moving into the dorms on Saturday were also given the opportunity to move in at 6:30 a.m. instead of 8 a.m.

Robertson said on Friday 38 people moved in before 8 a.m. and on Saturday over 100 women moved in early. She said it would be difficult to calculate the number of early movers on Sunday because students checked in on their floors and there wasn’t a way to keep track of the numbers.

— Edited by Rachel Block

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