Issues of Cook Hall

I am a freshman at Howard University and a resident of Cook Hall. As my first semester here draws to an end, I must say I was delighted with the faculty, as well as the whole learning experience. However, life on campus is not nearly as impressive. Visitation and Internet restrictions are my main concern.
Every now and then, there would be a notification at the entrance to the dorm saying that visitation would be taken away from us for a certain period of time. In fact, this happens so often that when it is given back, most students don’t even become aware of it until it is taken away again. While the Internet connection is very fast and dependable, some very important applications are rendered useless by an overly-protective network.
Visitation is of vital importance for some students, including myself. It’s my freshman year, and I’ve already worked on 2 group projects. These projects require a lot of research and teamwork and sometimes, very strict visitation hours make it hard for us to work out a convenient time for a meeting. I am aware of the fact that the I-Lab is open almost 24/7 and that it can be used for such meetings. However, for some of us, studying in a room with 200 other people is far from an ideal solution. Also, what bothers me is that visitation is biased in terms of sexual orientation. Having a person of the opposite sex in your room is a bit of a problem; having him or her spend the night- out of the question, even though this person might even be a blood relative. This policy is also unfair towards heterosexual people, and ‘’favours’’ homosexuals.
Cook Hall is a dorm predominantly reserved for student-athletes, and as such it is full of international citizens. The Internet restrictions I was referring to disable the use of various applications and programs, along with the most important one- Skype. This is a very useful program that allows people from all over the world to talk to each other online for free. For foreign students, using a phone would be ridiculously expensive, and that is why Skype is their only connection with family and relatives. Robbing us of Skype, of our only means of talking to our loved ones, is a crime.
I urge the Residence Life staff to reconsider their visitation policies and make them more uniform with the other universities in America. At the same time, I’d like to ask of you one more time to change your Internet Network Settings and allow us to use Skype. Opening the necessary ports is a one-minute job, and yet it would mean the world to all Cook Hall Residents.