Hearing that the new residence halls will be opening up for first-years next year made me reminisce back to my Gate House days. Even as a junior, I still identify as a Gate House kid and think back to my days there with a smile. I hope it’s a common thing to feel special sort of relationship to people who lived in the same dorm as you, because I certainly do.

Maybe it’s the shared Gate House experience of living off of Coop chick- en tenders because Frank is too far. Or the late night C-Store runs. Or even the strange smell that inevitably arises from the old carpeting. Whatever the common memory is, there’s something about your first dorm at Colgate that allows people to relate to each other. It’s one of the many quirky things about Colgate I have grown to love.

It seems year after year that people living in Gate House stick together. I certainly did. To this day, I still don’t quite understand the difference between Cobb and Bryan Complex or which building is Drake and which is Curtis. It’s crazy to think about how small this campus is and how, three years in, I still do not know all of it.

Many of my closest friends today were some of my first friends at Colgate that lived just down the second floor hallway. It was not the air conditioning or the cruiser stop that made my Gate House experience great—it was the neighbors. I am 100 percent confident that my Colgate experience would be very different if I had not lived there.

The funny thing about my sentimentality toward Gate House is it really is a piece of crap. It looks like a big gust of wind could take it down. The walls are paper thin and there is a new hole added to the hallway or common room each weekend. The whole building sticks out like a sore thumb among the other beautiful, cohesively designed buildings up the hill. I remember looking at the campus map when I received my room assignment and wondering why a residence hall would even be tucked into that weird corner of campus. While incoming first-years may not be excited to live in the dumpy building far from the quad, take it from me—they should be.

I don’t really know where I wanted to go with this article. I was going to start sharing memories from Gate House and try to explain why I loved the miserable little building so much, but this probably is not the best platform to publicize those stories. Maybe it’s because I’ve been feel- ing old lately, maybe it’s because “Two Years Ago Today” keeps popping up on my Snapchat to show the ridiculous memories of Gate House hijinks. The community I found in one of Colgate’s most underrated student residences laid the groundwork for me to become the person I am today.

Contact Matt Gentile at [email protected].