Through the first full week of classes, I’ve heard a surprisingly large amount of bitching and moaning from students regarding this school. No college is perfect and all schools have a few problems- it’s a known fact! Big school? Crime, classes in gyms, you know the deal. Small school? Not enough room, parking, food, the usual stuff. Obviously, Quinnipiac is no exception to the rule, but despite the constant knocks on the school that I hear from fellow students about how “there’s no room” or “this school sucks,” QU deserves a great deal of credit for taking the necessary steps in order to squash these issues a.s.a.p.

Exhibit A: housing. For all you returning students, remember last year when there were FIVE people in the Ledges and Commons rooms? Not only was that dropped in a hurry, but as you can see if you swing by Ledges, construction began on a new dorm over the summer in the area that USED to be a parking lot. Granted, study lounges are larger-than-normal rooms, but hey, is a study lounge always necessary? That’s what a dorm room is for anyways. Plus, QU has a very large, very expensive library- if you need quiet that badly, head on down there and make some use out of it! Of course, to build that new dorm, QU had to eliminate a parking lot, which leads me to…

Exhibit B: parking. Yeah, freshmen will argue this point since they have been banned from having cars, but we all know that many schools had that policy in place long before Quinnipiac was forced to adopt it due to a lack of space. Plus, I highly doubt the school was looking for a reason to ban freshmen from having cars at school; after all, remember that last year, when the Whitney Avenue parking lot was completed, it was billed as a “freshmen” lot. By banning freshmen from having cars and adopting the decal system, parking at school is now less frustrating and more organized; there’s more room to work with and people know exactly where they can park. Some people might think I’m supporting this simply because I am a junior, and I’m allowed to have a car on campus, but as a freshman, I didn’t, so I went through the same thing the current freshmen are going through now- just voluntarily.

Now obviously, those are not the only two problems that have hung over Quinnipiac in recent history, but they ARE the two biggest. With the constantly rising costs of college tuition combined with the ever growing importance of a college education, it would be easy for any institution to simply turn the other cheek to the problems facing their students. Combined with other improvements designed to make QU run smoother, such as signing in guests online and shuttles into town, Quinnipiac has made the necessary effort to show that the school cares about its students.

It could be worse: you could be at no college at all.