Martha from RevGalBlogPals writes:

Yesterday I returned my middle child for his second year of college. He’s an experienced dorm resident, having spent two years at a boarding high school. In the lounge at the end of his floor I found a suite of This End Up furniture that took me back to my years in the Theta house at William and Mary. I remember polishing that furniture with my sorority sisters every spring, just before we headed off for Beach Week at Nags Head.

Mindful that many others are heading off to further schooling or delivering their loved ones to the institutions that provide it, here are five questions about dorm life.

1) What was the hardest thing to leave behind when you went away to school for the first time? Probably pets. At the time we had an ancient feline, Foos, and a St. Bernard, Fezzik. There were no pets allowed in the sorority house. (Though truth be told, I was less than five miles away and could have dropped in any time to see them…)

2) We live in the era of helicopter parents. How much fuss did your parents make when you first left home? I’m number 5 of 7 kids. They were pretty good at the routine by then. However, they were also quite clear on what I had to (a) tell them (b) bring home as grades to continue to receive tuition buckages from them and (c) let me know when they felt I was not achieving at the level I could.

3) Share a favorite memory of living with schoolmates, whether in a dorm or other shared housing. My first “dorm” experience was a sorority house, since I went to college in the same town where I lived. During “Beat Michigan” week, Ohio State goes a little crazy. Just a little. We went to class with our faces painted half scarlet, half grey. One year, Michigan was an “away” game and we watched THE game on the sorority house TV set. The game was won in the final seconds and we poured out of the house, on to the street with everyone else on our street and had an impromptu “Script Ohio” led by — yours truly. I don’t know as it would have been recognizable, but I will never forget the campus policeman who “dotted the I” instead of making us get off the street…

4) What absolute necessity of college life in your day would seem hilariously out-of-date now? Oh dear. I think it is a toss up between electric rollers, my “stereo” that played cassettes or records, or my “Walkman”. I’ll go with the hot rollers, though. It’s hard to believe that I regularly tortured myself with these hot rollers, which had spikes in them, artfully arranged so that my long hair had “just” enough body and wave in it. By the time I had them arranged all over my head, metal clips poking every which way, my dad suggested that I looked like a satellite farm and could pick up broadcasts from China…

5) What innovation of today do you wish had been part of your life in college? Being able to buy cheap textbooks on the web. Seriously.

Bonus question for those whose college days feel like a long time ago: Share a rule or regulation that will seem funny now. Did you really follow it then?

“No men above the first floor.” Yes, we followed it. The Housemother ruled with an iron fist. However, it always made no sense to us, since the frat houses did not have a similar rule…