I first smelt it on my way to the Chinese Student Association meeting. Cruising down campus on my booster board to Burchard Hall with the wind rushing past me, I was enjoying the pleasant smell of the campus until my dream world got interrupted by something foul. I scrunch my nose in disgust as every olfactory sensory neuron in my nose gets assaulted in what I could only assume was chemical warfare. As I got off my skateboard and walked into Burchard, I could only think of one thing. “GYAD DAMN WHO BIFFED”.
After the meeting I left with some friends that I had made and went outside, only to literally be hit again with the same smell. I turned to the people around me and wondered if they were experiencing the same thing and everyone seemed to feel the same way. In the interest of self preservation, I left as quickly as possible.
For those who haven’t noticed (I have no clue how you couldn’t have), there has been a lurking stench of (for a lack of better words but not really) shit in the air. The smell can be comparable to the smell of a cow lot. While it has gotten better overtime that isn’t saying much. As someone who has all their classes in Burchard and McLean, I am getting tired of it already. McLean is constantly filled with the scent of cow feces and Burchard, depending on the wind direction, is spared no less. You know how hard it is to focus on DNS recursive servers when all I can think about is whose cow is releasing itself.
For the sake of this article not just being my crying about a foul smell, I decided to ask other fellow Stevens students about how they felt about the wafting smell of feces. Kaiden Garces Johannes, another cyber security major, had some strong words to say about the issue. “Yes bro there’s too many buildings that smell like f*****g shit, it’s so f*****g bad, like there’s certain rooms that I can’t even stand, like I will actually walk out of the classroom”. Another student, Jiya Jaisinghani, says “Omggg haha not great”. Other quotes from other students say, “I heard the smell got trapped inside the building last week lol is it still stinky”, “basement is the smelliest place i’ve ever been.” To sum it all up, it’s pretty bad and students have noticed.
After a little bit of sniffing around (haha get it), I figured out that the smell is actually coming from the front of the EAS buildings where all the renovations are happening. The source is the mulch or fertilizer that they are using to presumably regrow the grass in the yard in front of Debaun Auditorium.
This all being said, the freshman experience has been going pretty well so far. Considering the most upsetting thing that has happened to me over the week has been a wafting smell of shit coming from a renovating building, I’d say it could be worse. People have started to settle into campus, more functions are being held and the weather is becoming more bearable. College life is finally becoming more of a life and less like a retirement home. Until next time, toodles.
