Done With Dorms? Tell them about it

The college dorm can be where you form friendships that last forever. It can also be where you earn emotional scars you will carry your whole life.

A new website launched from Kalamazoo is aimed at those who are tired of being plagued by the noise, loss of privacy -- and if recent posts are to be believed -- the bugs, that come with dorm living.

In the style of My Life is Average, F--- My Life and I Can Has Cheezburger, Done With Dorms is the latest site to enter the cyber world with an invitation for readers to submit stories of the latest outrages in their lives.

The misery of sharing a shower with someone to whom you are not related, dealing with drunken fools in the elevator, and the skin scratching effects of bed bugs, mosquitos and spiders, are some of the topics posters are writing about. And like other such sites, there's a chance for other readers to gauge the poster's misery with a vote on the story. The poster is advised by the voting public that either they deserved what happened or they should get out of the dorm.

So far students from Western Michigan, Kalamazoo College and Michigan State University have related their unhappy tales. The site's drawn responses from across the country, too. Dorm dwellers from the University of Vermont, Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Central Florida University in Orlando the University of California in Los Angeles have all logged their readiness to be done with dorms.

An MSU student writes: My roommate is so hideously stank that I come in each night and just spray Febreze on the guy while he sleeps, and the guy doesn't even notice. I'm so DWD. (Editor's note: that stands for Done with Dorms, of course.)

From the University of Vermont comes the post: It's past 1am & I'm freezing my butt off because someone in the dorm can't use a microwave. I hate fire drills and I'm so DWD!

And Virginia Commonwealth University checks in with: I really f------ hate this dorm, they're filled with little f------ annoying pest known as silver fish... disgusting. I'm so DWD.

The institution a writer attends is listed as the "school under fire" and there's a spot on the site to post pictures of disgusting dorm food. Done With Dorms is not designed to please university housing administrators. That's not the point.

The point is to provide college students with a place to commiserate on their shared miseries. Just as important is an advertisement midpage that says "Need Housing in Kalamazoo?"

The site directs students who have had their fill of dormlife to information on housing alternatives provided by Hickory Management Services. Done With Dorms is the latest online marketing effort of the Kalamazoo real estate firm that attributes the 95 percent occupancy rate of its properties to its use of up-to-date marketing initiatives on social media to attract tenants.

The site is building a following primarily on Twitter, says webmaster Jeff Wright, an HMS employee. So far it has about 2,050 followers. Monthly contests are designed to get more people interacting with the site. An iPod and art for the walls of an apartment are among the prizes offered in the early contests. In the future, the company plans to provide information on sharing rides and a place for people to find out about potential roommates.

Wright says HMS owned the domain name, Done With Dorms, before the idea for the site was born. The company decided it could make better use of the domain name by actually building a site around it. HMS asked its young employees and others still in college to create the site targeted at those ready to move out of the dorms. What they have come up with is something they hope will be seen as all in good fun, says Joanna Randazzo, social media marketing manager for HMS.

If the site takes off the way the company hopes it does those who come to the site looking for leads on apartments will be able to find information specific to the community in which they live, through geo-targeted advertisement. HMS believes those businesses that cater to college students living in apartments -- from furniture stores to pizza shops -- will want to advertise on the site as traffic builds.

Done With Dorms is one of a huge number of domain names the company has stockpiled. Michael Fleckenstein, CEO, remembers clearly the day he realized the implications of having a unique domain name that when clicked on would direct people to the site for his business. Having been in real estate for many years, he was well aware of the power of a simple message recognizable from a car driving down the street at 40 miles an hour. That first sign by the road was "Rent at WMUSTUDENT.com" and it drove up traffic to his website by 30 percent. The traffic spike continued for about six months, Fleckenstein says.

Whether Done With Dorms will be able to generate the traffic and advertising that HMS officials hope is hard to predict.

"Who knows? It more or less depends on if the stars line up or not," Fleckenstein says, with a chuckle. "That's not just our challenge. That's the challenge for landlords in every university town across the country. We felt if we could build a site that with the right content would drive critical traffic then people would be willing to put down some dollars to be there."

Kathy Jennings is Southwest Michigan's Second Wave editor and a freelance writer and editor living in Kalamazoo.

Photos by Erik Holladay


Jeff Wright and Joanna Randazzo of HMS show off the new site, Done With Dorms.


Done with Dorms directs web traffic to Hickory Management Services and allows disgruntled dorm dwellers to vent at the same time.