<p>I was wondering if MIT dorms have mice? If so, which dorms are known for having rodents, insects...? Thanks!</p>
<p>I’ve heard of mice being a minor problem in some dorms and frats but nothing too serious. I haven’t experience any mice in the Macgregor high rise (I live on the 7th floor) but I’ve heard that there are occasionally mice in the low rise.</p>
<p>All buildings in Cambridge have mice, whether you see them or not.</p>
<p>I would also like to know how widespread this problem is. My d is there for summer research and was placed in Burton Conner. There are most definitely mice and roaches and plenty of pathways for them to come in: huge holes around the plumbing fixtures, etc. At move in she found droppings in the kitchen cabinets and has since seen mice and killed plenty of roaches. The dorms were supposed to have been cleaned before they moved in, but clearly had not been.</p>
<p>I don’ t think this is an MIT specific issue; this is common to many city dwellings. BC always had roaches and mice in the late 70s and early 80s when I was there. I doubt anything has changed. Learning to keep food sealed and the kitchen wiped up helps to minimize the problem in a suite; it probably encourages the wee beasties to move to a messier suite. The (rather cute) mice come out at night and helped keep me company when I was plugging away at 3 am at a particularly tedious problem set. They are not attack mice (unlike the roaches, …sigh), and usually won’t get to food sealed in heavy plastic.</p>
<p>What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger, and I have never heard of an MIT student being killed by a roach or a mouse, as disgusting as that probably sounds. It is definitely motivating to study harder so that you can afford to live in a nicer place.</p>
<p>Ever hear of the Hantavirus? It’s not common in the NE, but it’s not unheard of either.</p>
<p>[CDC</a> - How People Get Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS) - Hantavirus](<a href=“http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/hps/transmission.html]CDC”>Transmission | Hantavirus | DHCPP | CDC)<br>
[Case</a> of Hantavirus Confirmed in New York State](<a href=“http://www.health.ny.gov/press/releases/2012/2012-10-22_hantavirus]Case”>Case of Hantavirus Confirmed in New York State)</p>
<p>How is Hantavirus spread?</p>
<p>Hantavirus is spread from wild rodents to people. The virus, which is found in rodent urine, saliva, and feces, can be easily aerosolized in confined spaces when disturbed by rodents or human activities, such as sweeping or vacuuming. Breathing in the virus is the most common form of transmission; however, one can also become infected by touching the mouth or nose after handling contaminated materials. While rare, a rodent’s bite can also spread the virus.</p>
<p>@NeedAVacation, you may want to alert MIT or have your daughter notify the housemaster of that. According to <a href=“Housing & Residential Services | Division of Student Life”>Housing & Residential Services | Division of Student Life, if you find any signs of mice/pests, you should notify them immediately. She shouldn’t have to be killing roaches in the dorms.</p>
<p>WiseGuy, She said they did notify someone and were told he could give them mousetraps. I’m not sure if anything was said about the roach issue. I’m going to advise her to continue to pursue the issue with officials, but I told her in the meantime, they need to sanitize everything the best they can, spray on their own, and set some mousetraps. She’s been very impressed with the people and lab facilities at MIT, but the living situation is a huge concern, especially given the cost of housing there.</p>
<p>Absolutely—I agree that mousetraps doesn’t necessarily “solve” the issue, but there may be a limit to how much work can be done with people living in the rooms. I have no idea how that is handled.</p>
<p>That PDF I linked to before has some good tips for preventing mice/pests, so she should definitely be following all of those (at the very least, if she is neat and clean, the rodents/pests will flock to other, dirtier rooms instead :))</p>
<p>The cost of living at MIT is high because the cost of living in Cambridge and Boston is high. There are roaches and mice at MIT because there are roaches and mice in Cambridge and Boston.</p>
<p>As for this–
Cleaned does not mean fumigated.</p>
<p>I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to lower your standards. This isn’t a new issue and this isn’t an MIT-specific issue and this isn’t a Cambridge-specific issue and this isn’t an issue that MIT is ignoring. Some of the dorms are being fumigated this summer, and dorms have been fumigated in the past, and the dorms will continue to be fumigated. There are mice and roaches EVERYwhere here. There’s not terribly much that can be done. You can put out mouse-traps if you’d like. You can get a pet cat if you’d like. You can live in a high-rise dorm room if you’d like. You can avoid leaving food out in open containers if you’d like. You can do your dishes in a timely manner if you’d like. You can stop wearing your glass so you don’t have to see things you don’t like if you’d like.</p>
<p>What lidusha said. That said, it’s not as though you’ll just see roaches and mice all the time. I tended to kill one roach in my room a term, and chase out one mice in my room per school year. It wasn’t like I was hiding from them when I go to bed every night. It’s just unrealistic to think in old buildings in an old city, it’d be possible to get rid of them completely.</p>
<p>My labmates and I were discussing this yesterday, because there is a mouse that has taken up residence in our lab’s office area (at Harvard), as stupid as it is to be a rodent who lives among hardened and resourceful professional rodent-killers. </p>
<p>Everybody had a story: my co-worker who recently had a baby was talking about the mice running up and down the hallway at Mass General; my co-worker who owns a house in Central was talking about the mice who eat the food of his second-floor tenant; my co-worker who lives in the (Harvard) dorms was talking about the mouse that skittered across his bed in the middle of the night.</p>
<p>Like UMTMYP, I lived in the MacGregor high-rise, and I don’t recall ever having seen a mouse. But I do recall having heard them in the walls. There are mice in every building in Cambridge, especially the older ones, and especially the ones where people leave out tasty food for them to eat.</p>
<p>Some of the MIT dorms come equipped with cats.
:-)</p>
<p>Nice to know things haven’t changed since the 80s.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ha ha. Really? I think the students have a right to demand that their dorm be pest-free. Or at the very least, that MIT is trying to deal with the problem. It’s true that the pest problem is not unique to MIT. A year ago or so it was reported in the paper that Harvard dorms had a huge roach problem. However, there’s nothing about Cambridge that makes it impossible to live without pests.</p>
<p>Some dorms are dirtier than others. McCormick may be the cleanest.</p>
<p>I have a feeling that East Campus dorms may be worse than most West Campus dorms, although Baker looked pretty dirty to me.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m living in a West Campus dorm this summer, and it is disgusting how long people leave their dirty dishes out for. And not just in the sink. Everywhere. I usually live in an East Campus dorm and this never happens there. Take your stereotypes elsewhere.</p>
<p>The amount of pests does not necessarily follow the amount of dirty. You should consider the material of the building, how old the building is, what buildings are around that building… Random Hall has a lot of pests because it is next door to an abandoned saloon. Luckily that building is being demolished and Random Hall is being fumigated, so that won’t be the case after this summer.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Oh great idea. Let’s say we demand it. Then what? Most or all dorms fumigated every summer? Less or no summer housing, no free storage in dorms for the summer, everything must be cleared out and what isn’t cleared out is trash? Every summer? Because I’m pretty sure you would still have pests, even after that. And then what? Every week? Would we still have time for classes? Screw classes. Let’s just fumigate everything, every day, and lose our lives to an absurd fear of the city around us (or, you know, lung cancer from the fumigation).</p>
<p>And what about the other buildings? Are we going to shut down the Student Center because I saw a mouse in there last night? What about buildings where people are trying to do science and really, really wouldn’t appreciate the interruption?</p>
<p>On top of that, the health risks of constant fumigation are very, very real, and much more likely to affect us than the health risks from living among pests in a city, assuming you don’t catch the mice and roaches to eat without cooking them first. [Health</a> effects of pesticides - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_pesticides]Health”>Health effects of pesticides - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>I say the solution is snakes. Let’s release snakes all over campus. That should just about fix our mouse problem.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Uh, there are other ways to not live with pests other than constant fumigation. What do you think apartment buildings do? </p>
<p>
In one of the dorms (Senior house??), they intentionally sealed a piece of human feces in the wall. I also remember random ferrets walking around there, which were illegal at the time. In general, things seemed to be more lax. But hey, maybe the weird pets eat the pests. I don’t know.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m not blaming the students. It’s the administrations’ negligence which caused this.</p>
<p>Honestly, no disrespect was intended. A couple of East Campus dorms generally color people’s impression of all of them. </p>
<p>I do remember that Random House looked like it was about to collapse, but that wasn’t the student’s fault.</p>
<p>*Random Hall
*students’</p>