Illustration by Chris Sharron

Credit: DKS Editors

Read more Stories from Freshman year

Some students are reluctant to get out of the residence halls for fire alarms because they think it’s just another university fire drill.

Karly Cohen, junior early childhood education major, had problems leaving her Koonce Hall bed for a fire alarm when it went off at about 4 a.m. one night her freshman year. But her resistance wasn’t out of defiance – she was convinced she had pulled the alarm it herself.

Karly said she talks in her sleep, so sometimes what is going on in the real world occasionally finds its way into her dreams.

Karly’s roommate, Jackie, tried to tell her the fire alarm was going off, but the sleeping Karly was convinced she would get into trouble.

“I’m having a dream that I pulled the fire alarm saying, ‘No, Jackie, I can’t go down there. I did it. I pulled the fire alarm!'” Karly remembers saying.

Reassuring Karly that she did not pull the fire alarm, Jackie resorted to shaking her to wake her up.

“She shook me and was like, ‘Karly, come on. We’ve got to go. You didn’t do it, I promise,'” Karly said.

She finally exited the building, but it was not until she was back in her room that she finally accepted she did not pull the fire alarm.

Contact features reporter Pamela Crimbchin [email protected].

Sophomore Rachel Reed, a radiological and imaging sciences major, had a worst nightmare-caliber shower experience during her freshman year.

Unaware of the fire alarms blaring in Wright Hall, Rachel went right along with the shower she was taking. It wasn’t until her friend Melissa Marsh, now a sophomore pre-med major, came to the bathroom to tell Rachel the building was being cleared.

She only had time to get a sweatshirt from her room before she had to stand outside for 15 minutes with shampoo still in her hair.

But it got worse from there.

After the alarms ended, Rachel went back in the building to find that in the commotion, she locked herself out of her room. In the same shampooed hair and hoodie get-up, she had to go to the front desk to get a lockout key.

Eventually Rachel was able to make it back to the bathroom to rinse away the embarrassment along with the shampoo.

Contact features correspondent Nicole Aikens at [email protected].

Only two weeks into his freshman year, Brandon Jackson went home for Labor Day weekend. The senior business management major was flipping through the channels on TV when a familiar face popped on the screen.

A local news reporter interviewed a Kent State student describing a heroic act he just performed – saving another student from a fire that engulfed his residence hall. Brandon soon recognized the face to be a student that lived on his floor in Allyn Hall and immediately drove back to Kent State.

He arrived on the scene to find his room scorched and his belongings scattered in ashes.

Contact features correspondent Courtney Kerrigan at [email protected].