Roommates Garret Dederichs and Ben Ekdahl’s residence hall room features sports posters, colored lights and an inflatable moose head.
Dederichs and Ekdahl won the Residential Programs and Services Cool Room Contest.
The contest is a way for freshmen students to show what they’ve done with their room, whether it be decorations, an interesting setup or other distinct ideas, saidKatherine Schwieterman, Cool Room Contest judge.
“It’s a way to get freshman excited about their living situation and really embrace living in the dorm,” Schwieterman said.
Students had to submit up to three photos of their room to enter the contest. Schwieterman and six other judges then picked their top 15 entries.
“We really looked for authentic rooms that were original and really showed the personality of the people that live there,” Schwieterman said.
The top 15 were then posted for student votes. Dederichs and Ekdahl made it through the first round and then reached out to fellow students to ask them to check out their room and consider voting.
Dederichs and Ekdahl enjoy many aspects of their room, with their favorite being the rope lights that Dederichs set up under the top bunk bed and onto the floor.
With a click of the remote, the lights show a variety of different colors or flash at a variety of speeds. The lights give the room a cool atmosphere, Dederichs said.
This atmosphere of the room often attracts floormates, he said.
“It’s one of the three rooms that people hang out in,” Dederichs said.
In addition to the lights, various posters and other objects are hung up on the walls. A topic of interest for those entering the room are the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton posters hung side-by-side.
The posters mean the roommates are undecided about their votes, they said.
Both are Cubs fans, so they made sure to support their team by hanging up Cubs posters and flags. Next to those is an inflatable moose head.
“I always wanted to get a real mount of a moose head mount, so I figured the blow-up could be the closest thing I could do to a real moose,” Dederichs said.
For winning the contest, they were given $20 Target gift cards and a UE ROLL Wireless Mobile Bluetooth Speaker. These prizes were why Dederichs decided to enter the contest, he said.
As a former runner up of the Cool Room Contest, Schwieterman said she was excited to be a part of the experience. She said she enjoyed working with the other judges who were students or faculty from the interior design school.
At first she found picking the coolest rooms to be intimidating, but she said she soon found it to be a lot of fun looking at what students did with their rooms.
“You really got to see the personality of the students come through,” Schwieterman said.
