Confessions of Stever Dorm's President

If you had told me a year ago that I’d spend my Friday nights mediating a dispute over a stolen shower caddy and organizing a house-wide hunt for a missing air fryer, I would’ve laughed and gone back to refreshing Piazza. But here we are.

Welcome to life as the President of Stever House: part RA, part event planner, part unofficial therapist, part “Hey, can you open the door, I forgot my ID.”

It’s chaos. It’s loud. It’s oddly wholesome. And somehow, it’s my favorite part of CMU.

The first thing nobody tells you is that being Stever President is 20% planning events and 80% being @-mentioned in group chats.

There’s the “Stever 3rd Floor” chat. The “Stever 3rd Floor but Only If You Like Mario Kart” chat. The “Stever Stever Stever” meme chat that has no defined purpose other than sending cursed images of the elevators and unhinged 3 a.m. thoughts.

And then there’s the one true constant of Stever life:

“Hey, can someone let me in? I left my ID in my room.”

As president, I’ve become a walking, talking backup plan. My screen time report is just:

• 30% Canvas
• 20% scheduling emails
• 50% watching the group chat ping “DOES ANYONE HAVE A SCREWDRIVER” every time someone tries to assemble IKEA furniture at midnight.

There are, I’ve realized, a few unwritten laws of Stever House:

At least one laundry machine will be “broken”

“Broken” is in quotes because half the time it’s just someone who forgot to press start and then rage-posted in the group chat about it. The other half, a mysterious puddle appears and we all quietly pretend it’s just water.

The fire alarm will go off when you least deserve it

Not during your free afternoon. Not when you’re bored. No, it will go off:

• three minutes into your midterm cram session
• while you’re in the shower with shampoo in your hair
• midway through an emotional FaceTime with your parents

As president, you’re suddenly The Responsible One, standing outside in the cold, doing a headcount like you didn’t also sprint out of your room wearing one sock and clutching your laptop like a newborn child.

There will always be one mysterious smell on your floor

Is it food? Is it science? Is it someone’s forgotten bio lab sample? We may never know. We just open a window and move on.

People assume being house president is all about big things, planning events, talking to housing, making sure the whiteboard in the lounge doesn’t permanently say “midterm doom :).” And yeah, there’s plenty of that.

You plan football nights and game tournaments that you’re 60% sure no one will attend, and then suddenly 25 people show up because someone promised there’d be snacks. You organize study sessions during exam week and watch the room slowly transform from “focused academic grind” to “chaos featuring Cheez-Its and existential dread.”

But the moments that stick with me most are small.

Like the first-year who quietly asks if they can study in your room because their roommate is on a 4-hour Discord call. Or the late-night knock from someone who “just wanted to say hi,” but really needed to talk about homesickness. Or the spontaneous group therapy session that forms in the lounge at 1:12 a.m. over cold Vocelli’s and shared confusion about 15-122.

You start to notice patterns. The kid who always jokes around a bit too much when grades come back. The one who always shows up to events early “just to help set up” because they don’t want to walk in alone. The pair of strangers who become best friends after a Mario Kart race gets way too competitive.

Somewhere between the broken printers and the elevator small talk, you start to realize: this isn’t just a dorm. It’s a very weird, very chaotic, very earnest little ecosystem.

My favorite part of being Stever President, though, is watching the house slowly transform from a random assortment of strangers into something that actually feels like a community.

At the beginning of the year, the lounge is a quiet, slightly awkward place where people do work with headphones in and make minimal eye contact. By mid-semester, it’s:

• someone blasting a playlist that aggressively jumps from classical to K-pop to Drake
• a speedrun of who can finish a problem set fastest
• three parallel conversations happening over one half-functional kettle
• at least one person asleep on the couch with a textbook tented over their face like a tiny academic tombstone

Being president means you see that shift up close. You witness the first floor-wide joke, the first shared complaint, the first time people start saying “our floor” instead of “my floor.”

You watch people show up to things alone the first week and with a whole group the next month. You watch them drag each other to events:

“You said you wanted more friends, get up.”

“We’re going to Stever game night. Yes, now. No, you can’t bring your textbook.”

You realize you’re not really “in charge” of Stever House. You’re just the person who gets to nudge things into motion and then sit back and watch it turn into something bigger than you.

Of course, it’s not all wholesome sitcom moments. Sometimes it’s group chats roasting your Canva graphics for the next event. Sometimes it’s sending your fifth “Please clean up the kitchen” message of the week and knowing nobody will admit the Tupperware fossil in the sink is theirs.

But every time I’m about to complain, something small happens that resets my perspective:

• someone slips a sticky note under my door that just says, “Thanks for doing this.”
• someone who never came to anything all semester shows up to one last event and says, “I kind of wish I’d started coming earlier.”
• someone knocks to ask if they can borrow tape, and you end up talking for an hour about impostor syndrome, majors, and how weird it is to suddenly live with 200 strangers

Being Stever House President definitely wasn’t on my CMU bingo card. But I’m glad it happened.

Because in a place where it’s easy to get lost in p-sets, projects, and internship panic, Stever forces you to remember something simple: at the end of the day, college isn’t just about what you’re learning in class.

It’s about the people yelling in the hallway at midnight because someone burned popcorn. It’s about the friendships formed over broken washing machines and group study misery. It’s about that feeling, when you walk into the lobby after a long day, and realize:

Oh. These are my people. This is home.

Even if home currently smells like ramen, whiteboard markers, and just a hint of “what died in the fridge.”