Pullman, Wash. – the city that never sleeps.

Whether it is late nights spent studying or weekend nights spent celebrating, there aren’t enough hours in a day to accommodate the life of a WSU student. So people shouldn’t complain when it gets rowdy on College Hill.

College life resembles something out of the movie “Groundhog Day”: Go to class, study, hit the gym, and do it all over again.

Alarms that ring simultaneously throughout Pullman foretell the grind of the day ahead: chapters of dry reading backed up by pages of notes, hours in the library cut up by Twitter breaks and Fantasy Football line up tinkering. College is terrible.

Then there is the weekend, the pinnacle of life. All the sleepless nights and days spent studying are worth it for 48 hours of freedom. Most of the freedom takes place on College Hill. There are 23 fraternities, 13 sororities and hundreds of other students that make up the College Hill neighborhood, and every weekend they all get together to create one of the noisiest places in the world.

It simply cannot be helped. Whether it’s a thousand people talking or a thousand stereos playing music, it is going to be loud. On the weekend there are no tests or quizzes to study for, no essays to write and nothing to wake up for. On the weekend, college is great.

But it isn’t all fun and games on College Hill. Some folks are taking issue with the noise even though they chose to live in a place they know resembles the movie “Animal House.”

According to the Pullman Police Department’s annual report, 771 noise complaints were called in for the entire city last year. The city of Pullman’s population is 31,000.  That means about two percent of people in Pullman get noise complaints per year. It’s a safe bet that the majority of that two percent live on College Hill.

So why call in these noise complaints?

College Hill is as loud as ever, and 771 noise complaints a year is not going to phase 98 percent of the city’s population. And why do people choose to live on College Hill when there are three other quieter hills on which to live?

It is called ‘College’ Hill after all. Parties rage into the early hours of the morning, and the houses are falling apart.

Neighborhoods with nicer homes exist in residential areas surrounding campus. There are homes with working refrigerators and floors that have been cleaned more than once since 1905.  There are homes with yards not littered with beer cans and broken bottles of Smirnoff. But more importantly, there are homes with neighbors who aren’t loud, populated by families, professors, coaches, and business people.

Simply stated, there are too many young adults living on College Hill to do anything about the noise.

Every non-college town neighborhood has that house where all the high school kids hang out on the weekends. Their yells of celebration after winning an Xbox game, and their garage band practices can be heard throughout the streets. Take that house, multiply it by every house in the neighborhood, and you’ll have College Hill. That’s how the culture of the neighborhood works.

So when you move into a home on College Hill, remember one thing: you wanted the noise.

-Beau Baily is a junior communication major from Puyallup. He can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of Student Publications.