There's even a coffee table covered in books on the art of making cupcakes. How a Dartmouth student lives in such composed and civilized conditions is beyond me. Jocelyn Drexinger '12 keeps a cloth-covered footstool beside her bed along with not one, but two living plants, one of which sits in a pink pastel pot settled in a larger banana leaf dish on her coffee table. "This one's called a Hen and Chicks,'" she says with the calm reserve of a florist. "It's a succulent, so it doesn't take in much water."
I find Jocelyn lounging in a nightgown in front of some evening television coming from a small TV propped next to a fish tank on her bookshelf. She has the kind of room that seems transported from somewhere back home, a flower market in London or Anthropologie (her school-issued desk is tucked upside down under her bed).
As elegant and mature as it seems, Jocelyn's dorm room is actually quite crafty, I find out. Her mirror is framed in row upon row of magazine pages wrapped up into tiny little diploma-like rolls and stuck on with glue. "I used a steak skewer to roll them up," she says, as I admire a wall decal of two grape and rose-colored gumdrop trees that Jocelyn applied dot by dot. A little felt bird sitting on her bookshelf comes from a Martha Stewart "felting" pattern that her mom made her. Jocelyn explains that it's a type of wool work. "My mom and I are renovating our barn's guest room together," she says, explaining their most recent project: a turquoise chandelier. "We're using a brass frame we found on eBay and these big chunky pieces of turquoise that I got in bulk from a street vendor while on my art history FSP in Rome."In her corner is a bundle of peacock feathers from a handyman who worked at her house in Raleigh, N.C. "He kept peacocks in his house," Jocelyn explains, with a curiosity about her. "They apparently shed their feathers all the time."
Though her dorm shows her evident knack for interior design, Jocelyn is, as it turns out, "pre-vet." She works at a raptor rehabilitation center and an emergency animal clinic in the area. "The worst thing I've seen lately is a dog that got hit by a snow blower," she says, explaining that she was inspired to become a vet after seeing a turtle x-ray her freshman year. Jocelyn's fish is named Petrie after the pteranodon in "The Land Before Time." The only unframed painting on her wall was, she explained, made by cubs at a cheetah reserve she worked at in South Africa, a couple hours out of Johannesburg. "They made it by running with paint on their paws and we sold them to raise money for the reserve."
With her polished ivory skin and thick, just-brushed auburn hair, Jocelyn looks more like a lady who lounges than one who removes needles from cheetah paws. In fact, she reminds me of Julianne Moore a la the Fall/Winter Bulgari ads in which Moore is sprawled out with two baby lion cubs on a decadent crushed velvet chaise lounge. With the Venetian lamps casting a warm glow across her jewelry boxes, silk olive pillows and a rainbow of pashminas neatly stacked in a visible cupboard, Jocelyn's room looks like it's maintained by a decorum steward. I can only imagine what her vet's office will look like. "Next year I'm living in an apartment above Murphy's." I don't get the feeling she'll have a problem decorating.
