White-washed walls. Weak yellow lights. Cold tile floor. Mysterious carpet stains and the occasional cockroach. Guilford dorm rooms have the power to single-handedly depress just about any inhabitant.

“A bare naked wall is suicide,” said sophomore Mike Luciano. Resilient as Guilford students are, most haven’t succumbed to complete despair. Transforming these dreary dorms into a comfortable living space is a challenge, especially if you’re trying to avoid cliché room decorations. However, it’s a challenge that all students face if they want to survive college.

Some fail miserably. Some settle into a despondent acceptance of their depressing surroundings. Some triumph like champions.

For many students, slapping a Bob Marley poster onto some prominent place on the walls seems like the easy solution. In the song “Three Little Birds,” Bob Marley sings: ‘Don’t worry about a thing, cause every little thing gonna be all right.’

“It’s this iconic song,” said sophomore Felix Shapiro. “And I think it’s really a motto for Guilford students.”

Bob Marley represents that laid-back, easygoing lifestyle that every college student tries to lead. He’s a revolutionary thinker and he’s a sweet reggae artist. Is it any wonder that he’s every college student’s idol?

By hanging his poster in your room, however, you risk a serious identity crisis. You better remember your room number, because, once you take this route, there is little else that can distinguish your room from the 300 other rooms that are decorated with the same exact poster.

“Every kid at Guilford has 2 posters,” Shapiro said. “They have the Bob Marley poster where he’s holding the joint, and the Pulp Fiction poster with Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta.”

And then of course, you have the “Rules for Beer Pong” poster, that poster of Belushi from Animal House with his sweatshirt that says “College,” and the notorious Jimmy John’s Menus taped up somewhere on the walls. They’re classic, they’re cliché, and they’re everywhere.

So maybe there’s something appealing to fulfilling a cliché. Maybe it’s okay to subscribe to a classic college mentality. Perhaps filling that cliché is exactly what some need to feel comfortable in a college dorm. Either way, there are lots of additional ways to make these hostile rooms more livable.

Sophomore Thomas Cumby said it best: “You’ve got to cover the walls.”

They’re cold, hard, and ugly. They need to be covered, because they will bring you down. Posters are good to a certain extent. Often, they can express you better than anything else.

“The posters in our room reflect us so well,” first-year Sam Becker said about the room he shares with his roommate Sam Johnson.

Posters, however, usually don’t take up much space. As small as these rooms are, there is a lot of wall-space to work with.

With a little bit of tape you can cover your walls with just about anything. Vines, dried flowers, photos, maps, tapestries, you name it. Moving on to the floors, I’ll say one thing. If you have tile floor, cover it. Get a rug, a carpet – anything. The floor of my room is covered up with a sheet, but it’s covered, nonetheless.

Lighting is another issue. The lighting in our dorms is either too dim or overly fluorescent. Bringing in other kinds of lights can substantially improve the ambience of your room. Standing lights are nice because they don’t take up space on your desk and they can brighten up a room.

Plants, stools, cool artifacts – all of these are also great when it comes to room decoration. The bottom line is this: it’s your room, and you want it to reflect who you are, so decorate accordingly. Don’t be afraid to get unorthodox with your decorating – it makes up for all your cliché posters!