Taking the Llama for a Walk and Other Things That Helped Us

Dorm Room

Our dorm room was in Flint Hall, a residential building on campus mostly for first-year students. Flint was a welcoming space, made even better with an attached dining hall, mini-grocery store, study spaces, community lounges, and renovated bathrooms. Our floor was especially awesome, since we lived with the Education Learning Community. We were surrounded by a friendly, creative, and inclusive group that both of us “clicked” with. Olivia especially loved living in Flint, since there were so many opportunities there to meet and hang out with other first-year students. Kylie admits that though living in Flint brought back nostalgia from her own freshman year, socially, she would have preferred to be in a dorm with a range of ages and class years.

As visual people, our room in Flint was covered in decorations and constantly going through updates. Admittedly, the room as a whole was definitely a lot to look at. The back of our door was mostly reserved for reminders. We taped up everything from reminders for fire drill steps and weekly to-do lists to keep the room clean to lists of ideas for relaxing. As time moved on, our reminders overflowed to the sides of our closets or desks. Some of those reminders (we admit) came out of disagreements and bad days. For the most part, they were designed and created preemptively to make life easier and to test out new supports or ways of doing things. But the walls . . . oh, the walls! The walls were reserved for pictures of friends, cards, silly notes, and artwork. Since we collaged our walls together, we embraced those beautifully chaotic walls. Our room became our pride and joy. Our room was the one space on campus that we had complete control over, so it needed to be 100 percent our own and 100 percent for us. When we got home after a long day, we would look around at our safe-space creation, take a deep breath, and smile.

As all college dorm rooms are, our room was periodically checked by RAs and the fire department. Pretty much every time, we unfortunately were “fire-coded” and had to take some of our reminders and artwork off the wall. Somehow more artwork always seemed to mysteriously appear back on our walls.

Camera

In October, we decided to start a video blog (or vlog). The vlog started as a fun thing to do together. We would film funny videos, dance around the room, and text them to each other as little pick-me-ups. The vlog quickly became more prevalent when Kylie asked to use some of the vlogs for her thesis project on inclusive peer mentorship on college campuses. After long conversations about privacy, what might come from sharing our vlogs widely, and what the written portion of Kylie’s thesis might say, we came to an agreement. We agreed to adopt Camera.

We embraced this project to the point that “Camera” became our adopted third roommate, an embodiment of our dedication to sharing our experience.

Recording as much as we did helped Olivia and I feel comfortable around the camera—rather, Camera. We grew to not pretend or act when Camera was in the room with us; we grew to accept and embrace the idea that this project would be an honest portrayal of our experiences and who we were. If Camera was only allowed into our lives when we were dancing happily, this project would be a cute interpretation of college life. My intention was not to be cute.

Camera was an incredibly helpful roommate, providing me with a way to deeply reflect. I was able to grow as a person, roommate, friend, mentor, and educator because of Camera. But sometimes, I wished Camera would go away. I wanted to kick Camera out of the room and call them a terrible roommate. Filming my life for almost seven months was hard. There were certainly days where I did not want to film.

The truth is, Olivia and I did not film every second of our lives. Doing so would have been impossible for my hard-drive budget and too painful for our project mentality. This was an eight month-long project after all.

. . . We worked hard to find a balance between dedicating ourselves to this project and making sure it did not become something we dreaded or saw as an invasion of privacy. Sometimes that meant kicking Camera out of our lives for a couple days. That was okay. (Excerpt from Kylie’s May 2020 Senior Thesis)

It’s because of Camera that we were able to make a film about our experience and share it with other college roommates, mentors and mentees, and friends. We’re proud of how the film turned out and how we made sure it was a collaborative project from start to finish. It’s also because of Camera that we can deeply reflect and reminisce now. Camera reminds us of our time as roommates, both the good and the . . . not so good.

Homework (Film Reference: 22:18–28:30)

Homework is something that all college students have. There are assignments outside of class and studying to be done in order to get the most out of college courses. How each student learns, works, and studies is different. This is an area where we, Olivia and Kylie, had our differences. Homework time was really hard for us, hard to the point where the word homework itself became a source of stress. For Kylie, homework time meant independent focus on assignments and readings with her laptop out and headphones on. For Olivia, homework time meant having to sit alone, be quiet, and not having wanted (or needed) social interactions. It was a time when our needs clashed—often resulting in tears, arguments, and cracks in our relationship. To make things a little more humorous, but to still be able to have productive conversations about study times, we dubbed “homework” “taking the llama for a walk.” Weird and silly, sure. But it helped us.

Homework (or . . . the need to take the llama for a walk) was not going away and couldn’t be ignored. So, we had to figure out a way to make it work for both of us. Over the course of the year, we realized that there was not just one way to make homework time tolerable or productive. We had an index card next to Kylie’s desk that would say “It’s quiet time” on one side and “We can talk now” on the other. We had a list on the back of the door of quiet, relaxing choice activities to do when one of us was trying to focus independently. We made a “quiet space” underneath Olivia’s raised bed, fixed with a fuzzy rug, large pillows, a weighted blanket, coloring books, headphones, cool lighting, and (of course) snacks. We had a whiteboard schedule that we wrote out together every day, planning when homework time would be and what we would do before and after. We had a bag of fidgets, coloring books, and sudoku puzzles that we would bring with us pretty much everywhere. We rewarded ourselves for taking the llama for a walk by taking walking breaks or getting coffee together.

Sometimes, we took homework time out of the dorm room. We would go to the lobby of our dorm building, take over empty classrooms on campus, or find two spots relatively close together in the library. Together, we established a different routine and set of supports we would each use individually depending on where we chose to have quiet time. We found that changing the location of homework frequently helped us to not associate a certain place with bad experiences. We also found that we were too good of friends and too attached for our own good. Doing homework or quiet time in the same spot made individual, distraction-free focus really hard.

On particularly hard weeknights, Kylie would go to the library alone to do homework and Olivia would hang out in Flint. Typically, Olivia would see if a friend on the floor or an RA would be free to hang out. A few RAs would welcome Olivia to help them with their RA duties at the front desk. Other times, Olivia would just try to relax and chill in the dorm room until Kylie came home. Sometimes these strategies worked for us. Sometimes they did not.

Supporting Each Other

Homework was not the only thing we, as college students, had to work on. College is not just about classes! We both had individual long-term goals that we worked on together and individually. One of those goals for Olivia was independently traveling around campus. For Kylie, one of those goals was holding herself accountable for engaging in positive mental health practices.

College Life and Roommate Bonding

We both wanted to be college students first and foremost. That’s why we’re here. Through Camera, we have a lot of those moments, of us just being college students, caught on camera.

On Friday and Saturday nights when it was too cold (or we were feeling a little lazy), we would lay out blankets and gather our favorite junk food to enjoy relaxing movie nights. If we were feeling more social (which was usually the case), we would join friends for university-sponsored late-night recreation (Orange After Dark Events). Since we both love to dance, we joined the Orange Pulse Dance Troupe together and enjoyed practicing for the annual showcase with fellow dance and music lovers. Sometimes we wanted to go off on our own roommate adventures off-campus, just the two of us! We would go for walks in the park or around the city, take a bus to the mall, or play in the snow. Looking back, one of our favorite roommate trips was to Barnes & Noble (film reference: 9:21–10:31).

Not all of our roommate bonding or general college silliness involved leaving campus. Our fun didn’t have to be super planned or structured! There were a million places on campus to explore, and we enjoyed walking around to find the coolest spots together. Sometimes, if we found a particularly cool spot, we would stake it out. Usually, Camera was not invited to these outings. There were a few exceptions (film reference: 34:49–36:09):

The best thing about being roommates was also what made being roommates so hard. We were roommates and mentor/mentee first, but our relationship quickly became a friendship first and foremost. Having that genuine friendship was the best! We were able to talk about anything together, were always there for each other, and enjoyed each other’s company. From Orange Pulse Dance classes, to campus events like OttoTHON, to university musicals and plays, to coffee trips, we were side by side, loving every minute. We felt like we could be ourselves around each other.

But at the same time, having all three of those pieces together (being roommates, friends, and in a mentorship), our relationship was really complicated. With the roles we played in our multidimensional relationships constantly switching, setting up boundaries was really challenging. We had to have some conversations as roommates that did not feel like a conversation among good friends. At times, our mentor/mentee relationship felt like it was stuck in the middle between being roommates and friends. Some of our talks about support were directly related to helping each other as roommates or college-student peers, while others directly related to helping each other as friends. Having other mentors and friends around was helpful at times. We both felt like it was healthy to spend time with other people and take a break from each other, no matter how hard it was to be apart.

After our time as roommates and mentor/mentee came to an end, all that remained was our friendship. In a way, our friendship is better now (two years later) because we don’t have to go through the roommate arguments and homework-related conflicts anymore. At the same time, our friendship was stronger when we were roommates because we spent so much time together. We both agree that we’d take being roommates again any day! We miss living in Flint Hall, room 471 together.

We can’t forget to tell you more about our film! We wanted our film to go beyond saying, “Inclusion works,” to say, “This is how an aspect of inclusion can work.” It’s important to note that even though the film includes our thoughts and the thoughts from eleven of our peers, the film does not show all experiences or perspectives on mentorship. Student experiences and perspectives, whether represented in our film or not, are valid!

It was quite the experience being filmmakers and featured in the film!! The good thing about being the filmmakers was that we got to choose what was included in the final cut. But now that the film is out there, we don’t know exactly who will see the film or how it will be interpreted by others. It’s a little bit scary to be so vulnerable to people we won’t know! We’re not perfect people and didn’t always get mentorship right. The film is honest about that fact. If the film only showed the good times, not much learning would come from it. We’re glad that the film represents the whole big picture.

We started doing this work because we like working together. We’re continuing to do this work because we are proud of the work we’ve already done. We want to share what we learned with future students in inclusive mentorships or in higher education so that they can start from where we finished. And They Were Roommates: Navigating Inclusive Mentorship in Higher Education is a film project by students, to students (and those who continue to support inclusive college opportunities for all students).