A bit of background before we get into this blog post:

This is a complaint I’ve written on our university’s questionnaire for student accommodation experience. The things I’ve talked about are painfully true.

Living in the university student accommodation has barely been enjoyable for me… Posting this on my blog is my form of a protest, I guess, but it’s mainly for me to record facts and feelings before memories fade away, and to let people see what sort of things can happen. I believe it’s valuable in itself that our experiences are recorded.

Also, if you’re feeling down these days, hopefully this will make you feel that you’re a bit more lucky :)

Some detailed descriptions have been removed for protection of privacy.

The design of locations of some bedrooms at my hall of accommodation is simply unreasonable, and some current bedrooms are simply not fit for anyone to live in due to the excessive noise from nearby community spaces.

For example, me and my neighbor’s rooms (ground floor) are right above our hall’s games room (basement) and right opposite to a large kitchen used by at least 30 people, with an estimated distance of less than 5 meters away. Between our bedrooms and the kitchen, there is our hall’s outdoors social space where there are benches for people to socialize and the closest bench is within 2 meters from my window. The windows, walls, and floors also have extremely ineffective soundproof at my hall, at least in the section where our rooms are at. We are dissatisfied with the excessive noise which has caused significant disruptions to our daily lives.

First thing is that, since we moved into the hall, we have been forced to endure clearly audible noise from the basement, such as loud drum beats from loudspeakers during parties, voice of people chatting, doors closing, etc., which happen at varying frequencies. By rough estimates, the frequency is on average 3 days a week, and most usually happen in the evening, both before and after 11 PM. Especially with the drum beats, they cause our whole bedrooms to vibrate and resonate, which makes our rooms essentially into a party space, absolutely unfit for studying or living.

Second thing is that, each of our only windows directly faces the large kitchen mentioned above. Almost on a daily basis (which is not a rough estimation, but quite an accurate account), we hear noise of people either talking or playing loud music in that kitchen. The poor soundproof of our windows does not help. The kitchen has large sliding doors/ceiling-to-floor sliding windows directly facing our bedroom windows, which usually stay open, so the noise is very loud when it gets to us. We have tried to ask people in the kitchen to close their doors, but it is indeed reasonable for them to have good ventilation and to be able to get into or out of the kitchen.

Third thing is that, whenever the hall holds evening/night time events in the outdoors social space, due to its short distance from our rooms, we can hear the continuous noise from the event very clearly. However this can even be said to be minor compared to the previous two points.

My neighbor and I both had experiences of not being able to sleep at night due to the evidently excessive noise. We are also (sadly) very experienced with the procedure of calling the duty warden or going to the reception to complain about the noise. The action of staff has been often effective, however this solution to the problem is only for noise after 11 PM. Basically, we cannot do anything except for begging for others’ mercy to keep their voice or music down. Imagine living and studying somewhere you constantly hear random people talking (even when they talk at normal volumes!), screaming, laughing, playing loud music, closing doors (in the normal way!), so on and so forth. I do not know how long I can live with the noise without developing a mental or physical health issue (which might be developing already), but I am very looking forward to moving out in July for sure.

The noise is endless, but all the people making the noise are not doing anything wrong—they are just using the facilities to do what they are designed to be used for. Ultimately, this problem originates from the design of the hall to put our bedrooms in such a “convenient” and “good-for-living” location, and the university’s judgement that these bedrooms are even ever suitable to be allocated to anyone.