Laundry is one of the biggest lifestyle changes college students experience. Some students come to college not knowing how to do laundry, while some others do. The students who live close by, and have the fortune to have a car, have the opportunity to go back home every weekend or so to do laundry. But what happens for those who cannot go back home?
In a recent anonymous student survey about the laundry facilities on campus, students expressed their feelings towards the laundry facilities. For the most part, the students that participated in the survey do not seem to be happy with their respective laundry facilities this semester.
Each residence hall at McDaniel possesses a laundry facility for students. Each facility has an average of four to six washing machines and an equal number of driers. Each machine functions by quarters or McDaniel bucks. Also, each of these residence hall facilities has vending machines and lounges where students can relax and wait while their clothes get cleaned.
It all sounds like a good place to do your laundry, doesn’t it? As sweet as this may sound, this is not the reality at the multiple laundry facilities on campus. In fact, over the last few months there have been multiple complaints about the laundry facilities at McDaniel.
“McDaniel needs to step up their game when it comes to laundry machines,” expressed one frustrated student in the anonymous survey. “We need more washers and dryers, and they need to be able to work for more than a week without breaking down.”
Another student stated, “I have had to start doing my laundry on weekdays when no one else does their laundry because there are never enough [machines] available otherwise. There is usually at least one washer and one dryer that are not able to be used because they are broken. It is very frustrating sometimes.”
As a student living on campus, I myself experience these problems. It is really frustrating when trying to do your laundry at the same time as my entire building and being unable to do so when I think I would be able to because only a handful of machines are available.
One would think that with the amount of money students pay to go to McDaniel, we would have better laundry facilities.
“The fact that we have to pay $2.50 a load is borderline ridiculous,” said one student who participated in the survey. “Many schools have laundry facilities for free, and have similar tuition prices as McDaniel does. The math on the money we spend doing laundry at school totals out to be about sixty bucks a semester. This is assuming you wash your clothes every week, and wash sheets and/or towels once every other week, which is still a bit conservative. Many students are able to avoid this by going home on the weekends and just having their parents do their laundry, but it’s very difficult if you are unable to go home or go somewhere on the weekends to do the laundry for free.”
Another one of the issues the students in the survey point out is the fact that most of these facilities are rarely clean. “Dirty floors,” “It’s not very visually appealing. It’s usually dirty,” and “DIRTY DISGUSTING NOT CLEANED ALWAYS BROKEN POORLY WORKING,” are just some of the comments written by participants in the survey about the cleanliness of the laundry facilities they use.
“Please at least send someone to clean that underground laundry because it seem so left out and forgotten and safely and hygiene is also an issue,” said a concerned student about the way these facilities are maintained. “Rats and unidentified creatures lives in that place that attracted to an access to water source which will not be that safe if a rat peed on the water being use for laundry.”
Perhaps in the near future, we will see a change in the laundry facilities on campus. But for the moment, many of us will have to deal with dirty facilities and improperly working machines in a world where everyone decides to do laundry at the same time.
The following data was collected from the anonymous student laundry facility survey. This is not a scientific poll.
