 Hello, it's Elliott again here at Holcomb Hall. I'm currently in the bowels of Holcomb in the basement. Right now, we are in the kitchen, so they have a full kitchen here in Holcomb Hall, complete with microwave, really nice stove and oven, and complete with your fridge. Like we told people for the future showcase this morning, if you don't want people to steal your food, put your name on it, it's a big deal, because they will steal it. I lost many tubs of ice cream doing that. I wonder how often they clean them out too. They probably clean them out once every week or two weeks. Several hundred people live in here. How many people live here in this hall? About 150 people live in this hall, and 40% of those roughly are international students. So our majority of students from international countries come here to stay. Yeah, so it becomes a real melting pot. It really does. You get to learn all sorts of crazy things about different cultures and different people from all around the world. So we're on the basement floor, and you might hear some construction going on. Basically what it is, is they're taking up some of the flooring and putting down new flooring for you. Right. So this is the basement common area. So this is where a lot of people come hang out. We've got pool, we've got two ping pong tables set up for anybody to play at any time. Fireplace too. Fireplace is very nice during the winter time. This is kind of like the social hub down here. If you're looking to play games and have fun with people, if you need any of the equipment, anything you need like pool balls or ping pong paddles or anything like that, you can check out upstairs at the front desk and you just have to turn in your ID card and they'll give it to you. So if we were gonna go one-on-one right now and I got you picked the weapon, picked the sport, which one would you go with? Ping pong, foosball, billiards? I think I'd have to beat you in ping pong, okay? Oh, really? I'm undefeated, so. Undefeated. Undefeated. The champ right here. Who knew? The champ in the making. Okay. So we're about to continue down the basement hallway. And it looks like all of these have sort of a hallway that is sort of in the middle and goes down straight. Yeah. And we'll go upstairs and check out the first floor. Before we go, we're gonna check out the laundry room. Yeah, it's good. In the bowels of the pool dome. So you come all the way down to the basement. The last room on your left, this is the laundry room here. It's set up with an ice machine and four washers and four dryers and plenty of pooling tables and places to sit. All sorts of fun stuff. Bidding machines over here. Okay, so we have a recycling area over there too. Okay, yes sir. Yeah. And so the other cool thing is, now that we've been upgrading all of our stuff here at the university, so one of the coolest thing that we got this last year was we got brand new washers and dryers from a company called Caldwell and Gregory. And what they've done is they've actually made it so you can scan these QR codes and go on their website. And it'll show you which washers and dryers are open at what times, if anything's vacant, so you can put your stuff in. And you can actually set timers for your stuff so it gives you a notification on your phone like, hey, your laundry's done. Come pick it up. Yeah, come pick it up. Exactly, okay, let me continue the tour here at the laundry facility. And one thing you'll notice is that there are no, there's no place to pay for the laundry. It's all included. All included in your room fees. You can wash all day long if you want. And we talked earlier about pods versus powder versus what do you use? I use pods. I'm starting to get into pods. I usually use liquid detergent. Be careful, I've seen a lot of people put way too much stuff in there and there will be bubbles everywhere. Bubbles everywhere. Okay, we wanna try to avoid that. At all costs. Those of you who are listening, feel free to ask any questions you'd like. We're gonna go through and tour the whole building and then we'll go to a room and you're welcome to ask for measurements if you wish or anything else. We're also gonna take a tour by the International Students and Scholars Office. We are. So we're heading into the elevator. So we gotta teach y'all a little bit of a trick real quick. So to ensure security here, everybody can get in certain, during certain business hours, but in order to get into the residence hall, you actually have to have a FOB program specifically for Holcomb. And that also goes for the elevator. So in order to use the elevator, what you have to do is I have a FOB in my wallet here. Can you pull it out and show it to them? Mine is gonna be different than anyone else's. Y'all are gonna have little FOBs on your actual key rings. Okay, maybe you got one little one. Mr. Ken has one right there. I've got a special one that's a prox card. And what you do is you'll just hold it up and it'll beep at you and then you'll press which floor you wanna go. Okay, sorry about that. I think we lost the connection for a moment as we were in the elevator, but it looks like we've come back and we're live again. Hello there. Hello there. All right, so down the hallway, we're on the first floor now. So the ground entrance behind me is the office of international students and scholars. And so this is where a lot of the international students work with professionals in coming to school here. Yeah, sure. And we're looking forward to saying hello to them because I know a lot of you, this will be maybe even your first time to United States. And so we're pleased to have you. Can we say hello to you? Hello. Hi. Hello, hello. Can you introduce yourselves? Hi, I'm Grace. Uh-huh, Grace. My name is Cameron Kecha. I'm the visiting student coordinator at the U of A. Welcome to the International Students and Scholars Office. Yeah, absolutely. What are some of the things that an international student might be doing here? Sure, international students, we actually provide a comprehensive system of support for them. So if they have immigration questions or concerns, they can speak to our compliance department. We've got an outreach group that arranges community involvement that's off campus and on campus, a host of different programs to keep international students involved. And then also our retention group, which handles international student orientation and lots of other fun activities throughout the semester. Fantastic. And I guess we partner with you guys to do a night market, is that right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's one of my favorite events. Well, look, and if you come here with that, is we'll talk about when we get to the room where we do it, but that's a potluck of international students. Absolutely. You bet. Thank you very much for your time. It was good to meet you both. All right, let's head on down and see. All right, so if you look over here, we have some very rustic looking mailboxes. These actually are just for appearance. What happens is we consolidated Holcomb's mail system to the Northwest Quad, which is right across the street. It also has the Fulbright dining hall so you can literally walk across the street. It's like a minute walk and you can have food whenever you want. But all of your mail will be through the Northwest Quad and if you get any packages, just send it there and you'll be good to go. If you come around this corner, you'll see the front desk area. And so this will be staffed every weekday until 10 p.m. and on weekends until midnight. And so if you have anything, like you need to check out some ping pong paddles, anywhere to, there's a maintenance request or anything like that. These people, whoever staffed at the desk will be able to help you out with that. And if they're not here, there's always a number to call to find someone who can talk to you. And they'll help you out. Yeah, maybe we should just mention what we're doing out here with the construction. So out here, we are... Well, let's go down to the end first and look at that. So down here, the building has two sets of staircases on each side, one per wing, I guess. What this is, they have a 24-hour, quiet hour study room here. So again, very serious. 24 hours a day. 24 hours a day. Quietest period. You have to fog into the building to get access to this point. But at any point during the day, you can come in here. It's one main large study area. Give people a look at this. Here we are, 24-hour quiet area. It says it right there. And then if you need any more privacy, we have two smaller subdivisions off the main area. Yeah, let's take a look at one of those rooms. So we've got a full room here and then two other study areas here. But you do have windows. So you could see out into the world, even while you're studying. That's always an important thing. You're not closed off from society. You're not closed off from society. There you go. All right, so anything else we wanna see right in here? No? I think this is good. Okay. So right through here, there's a small kitchenette. Those have a stove or anything like that, but it's kinda handy just because you have a microwave or if you need more storage, if the downstairs fridge is full, they have another one right here. Yeah. So this is, you know, a little, it's a temporary patch if you need something quick. Did you cook much in the residence halls? Were you lived? I'm not a cook. We put it that way. Simple as that. I didn't wanna burn the building. What about ramen? Did you do ramen? You know, I'm not a stereotypical college kid. I've never had ramen. Wow. Ever. Never had ramen. I'm ashamed to say it. Okay. What we have here is, I guess, the piano room, hence the piano. For those of you who are musically inclined, you are more than welcome to come and play a concert right there. And this place is always jam-packed. People are down here at all times of the night. It's really fun just getting to see all the different people from different cultures. And they have some pretty talented musicians here. It's really fun to listen to at night. Yeah, I can imagine so. We're about to walk into this more formal room. And this is my favorite place in Hulkin. This is the great living room. It was fairly newly refurbished. It's got pretty new furniture and all that stuff. This is a great place for just hanging out. They've got a nice fireplace over here. Oh yeah. But it's just really fun to come hang out with your friends, enjoy a nice chill day here in the living room. And this is the place we mentioned earlier, our collaboration with the Office of International Students and Scholars, which is the night market where you have students from all over the world who come and bring a native dish and then they just share them. So it's like a literal potluck of different nationalities. And it's delicious. I mean, you've been? You've been? I have not, but I've heard stories about the deliciousness of it. Oh, it's amazing. I saw pictures of it from last year. And there was stuff from Korea, stuff from Japan, the various, like Ukraine, it was just small. The Americans actually brought in some dishes of their own, hot dogs and hamburgers. All right. You're American, right? All right. Okay. So do we want to then? You can check out the front. Yeah, let's take a moment. We're doing some construction in the front. It's just worth showing you, because we're trying to make the front a little more beautiful for you. Accessible also. And accessibility. So we built a new ramp to make it easier to get up here, right there. And then otherwise, let's, this street right here is Garland, just so they can know. And Garland, this direction leads into the union, the student union. And then in this direction, it leads down to the bookstore and Fulbright Dining. Right. And there's Pat Walker Health Center right there. If you get sick or need any sort of medical attention, the Pat Walker Health Center is free to all students. It is. And we offer that just as one of your student benefits. Okay. So let me just try to get a look of the outside. It's a really beautiful building. Yeah. And it's centrally located. Like I said, it's right next to the Fulbright Dining Center, which is really nice. If you ever get hungry, just walk half a minute to the dining hall and you're good to go. So let's go see a room and some other things upstairs. So Elliot, you're an RA, right? I am indeed. What is an RA? So an RA stands for Resident Assistant. And what that is, we, I like to call it, we are professional freshmen. And so we live in the dorms with the freshmen. We make sure that if they need anything, we can get them connected to whatever they need to be. You know, different RSOs or different programs or anything like that. Any tutoring that they might need, we can also point them in the right direction. But we're just kind of there to make sure everything's going according to plan. Kind of bridge the gap for us here. Exactly. Exactly. We serve as the, the wise counsel for the freshmen. Well, excellent. I'd have your capable hands helping our freshmen now. There's, there's I think 160 RA, something like that. There's quite a few. Right. I'm not sure exactly the number, but. Quite a bit. And we have a few that of course live here too. Now, just an apology, we may end up losing the signal for a second as we're in the elevator, but we'll be back. We'll be back shortly. Yeah. Have you been, how long have you been an RA? Just one year. I'll come back for a second year next year though. You liked it so much you come back a second year. Exactly. They didn't break me last year. Didn't break you. It didn't break us. That is true. Yeah. Not yet at least. Yeah. After you. Okay. So they have, I guess common areas here on this floor too, right? They do. So if you don't feel like making a trip all the way down stairs to study with other people or in that 24 hour quiet out set area, excuse me. On each floor they have these study rooms right here. And so nice chill environment. You just get to come hang out. You can close the door and just have a nice quiet, peaceful time of studying. You have that big window too. That's kind of nice. I'm gonna open it up. See if we can't see out there. Oh, okay. That's Pat Walker again, Pat Walker Health Center. Where you can go to have your medical needs attended to. Right. Gotcha. And so they have one of these on every single floor. We're gonna check out a single room and a double room. Let's do the bathroom first. All right. Sounds like a plan. Yeah. So on each side of the hallway, so in each corridor there is a huge bathroom. And so the way it works is this building is co-ed and it's broken down floor by floor. So guys will be on one floor, girls will be on the next floor. So there'll be two girls' bathrooms on each floor on every girls' floor and then so on and so forth. But very large, very spacious bathrooms. We'll give you a look at what a shower looks like here. Here's our shower. This is one of the larger ones. And you have kind of the front area to get dressed. Do you have a little place to sit? I can actually. Okay. Man, I'm living the high life now. Yeah, you have a little area there you can sit as well. And then the shower actually is pretty, pretty wide for these kind of showers. Right. So there should be four of these in every bathroom and then lots of toilets to use, another access point for the other side of the hallway if you don't know where to go. And then plenty of sinks. And if you wanna check yourself out before you go out, then plenty of mirrors as well. Is there anybody listening from another country that we can say hello to? Cause we sure love the fact that people might come to the University of Arkansas from somewhere else. It's pretty cool. Yeah, we like it. All right. So you wanna look at the single room or the double room first? I think we'll do the single room. Okay. And if I remember correctly, it is 222. I saw you have this on earlier. Oh, just kidding. Thanks, Kevin, keep it straight. Let's start with this one. All right, so this is the single room. And so one bed, this is one person's room. You get a chest of drawers right here and a desk right there with a chair and a bed with a mattress. And then you have a built-in closet with plenty of shelf space, some more cabinets up there. And the nice part is you have your own AC unit with the thermostat. So if you like it cold, you can make it cold. If you don't like it cold, it's up to you. Is the adjuster in here? It is. And so this is it right here against the wall. And so pretty easy to use. Not too many buttons. So very easy to use. Right now we have a chilly 65.5, it looks like. This is how I like it. I keep my room at 62 degrees. Oh my gosh, that is a meat locker. It is very nice. One other thing about these beds is you can actually loft these beds. So what'll happen is you'll have an extra set of these frames and you can pull this part and after you get it connected, you can make a double stack pretty much and you can put your bed as high as you want as far as it can go. And what I used to do in my freshman years, I would move my desk and stuff under there and free up a lot more space just so I could have more space. You'd move like this under your case as much as possible. Okay, yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Well, let's go ahead and check out the other room. All right. And something worth mentioning too is earlier we had our ResNet technicians in here installing some points to make the wireless stronger. So the wireless should be much stronger in Holcomb. Which is very nice. Yeah, starting this fall. We're real excited about that. And just in case you don't know, ResNet is a service offered by housing that ensures you're able to get online. And you can live or die by that nice. Now, we do have Ethernet though, I think in all the rooms, so that if you're taking that test and you absolutely need no interruption whatsoever, then you can plug in through a Ethernet cable. We do have a question that just came in from Catherine. Does the closet have shelves on both sides? I think we're talking about the single in this case, but let's go ahead and talk about the devil first. Does the closet have shelves on both sides? It does not. So this one, it shouldn't have plenty of places for you to put your shoes and stuff, but it's only on one side. Do you see that Catherine? There it is there. But on this side, no, you don't have that. You have this area up here, sure. And then you have this area up here too, which is pretty interesting. Bridget asks, what are the single bedroom window dimensions? And we may have them there, but we should go ahead and do a tape measure to ensure we have them correct if you don't mind. Let's see if we can figure it out. The windows should be 60 inches wide and 68 inches high, but we will check just to make sure. Of course. Our pleasure, Catherine. Yeah, it'd be about 60 inches. This one says 48. So it probably differs by room. This one looks like it's about four feet wide and about five feet high. Okay, so there's a slight, maybe inch or two variation from what it says there, maybe? Correct. The general dimensions are to be found on the housing website under campus communities, then finding the residence hall where you're living. About halfway down the page, you should be able to find the dimensions, but we're happy to take any dimensions we need to right now. Let me get up more of a tour or a circle of the room. Let's see, let me show off this closet too. So this is a double. So there's two big closets. Yeah. There's your shelving. And then up here at that space. If you're so inclined to do that bunk beds, don't want me to try it, it's pretty fun. And then the desk right there. And then this right here, what is this? So that's a little my stand. Okay. Are there two? Yeah, there's two of them right there. Right, so essentially there's two of everything compared to a single room. And like he said, with everything, every single measurement for this room is on the housing website. So if you go to housing.uark.edu and go to campus communities and select Holcomb, about like halfway down the page, they'll give you everything. So go from windows to the desk, all the dimensions that you could possibly need. Sure. We are certainly happy to get in here too. So two beds, a lot of times we're asked what size of the beds. Do you mind measuring it or telling us what it is off there? The Twin XL is the best way to go for it. I believe they're 65 or 70 inches. They're 80 inches long. 80 inches. The big ones are 80 inches long. Okay. This one says it is 80 inches. So. 80 inches, okay. So it is the XL. Great, great. So if you get the twins, you might be stretching a little bit. We'll see. Now Abby, who did our tours before, she's I think five, seven and she was on a regular 75 and she said she was fine. So just a general rule of thumb, I think. Yeah. So we'll see and what else? Oh, can you show us the chair? Do you know the conversion on the chair? Conversion. Are we about to teach you something? Uh-oh. Can you show him how to convert that chair? Are we raising it? No, we're just taking it off. Perfect, yes. So it converts into a rocking chair. It's a tray or a stool. Yep, it can go up and down, I think a little bit too. Can you raise it up or down? Perfect, perfect. I feel like this is great for gaming. Yeah. Okay. You're learning something new every day? Well, there you go. It's all about why we do these tours, right? Share information. If there's nothing else, and we'll take another second or two to have questions asked, then we'll probably go ahead and sign off. Does anybody else have any questions? For Elliot or for the room or anything? You're taking questions, right? I'm a professional freshman. Yes. You can ask me anything about living at the University of Arkansas. It's pretty awesome. I've loved it and one of the girls that's gonna be on staff with me next year, she lived here last year and she said she was absolutely in love with the cultures that she met, the people that she encountered here. Holcomb is definitely the coolest place on campus, if you ask me, just because you get to meet such diverse people, get to meet their cultures and understand really the background behind people and how they are. When I was an undergraduate, I met a student from Hong Kong and we continue to talk every few years. And it's interesting to see a national event happen and to be able to contact someone in that city and say, what did you think? Right. And then really find out that firsthand experience. Okay, Robert asks about when he will find out, we'll have a roommate, we can, I'll answer that in the thread as we go. But thank you, everyone, for participating and I appreciate it. You wanna wave us out? There you go. Goodbye, everybody.