In the hallway leading toward Goldstein Auditorium in the Schine Student Center, sophomore Jenny Lee found something: the final poster for her South Campus apartment.

‘It’s one of a cat,’ said Lee, an undecided sophomore in The College of Arts and Sciences. ‘I was looking for this one.’

Lee found the poster at Beyond the Wall’s poster sale, an event that has become synonymous with the start of each semester at Syracuse University. For over 15 years, SU has teamed up with Beyond the Wall to offer students decorations for their dorm room walls. This year, the sales on campus continue to expand. Through Sept. 24, there will be six poster sales going on for a limited time at six different locations across campus.

Each year, students return to these sales to buy more posters for their rooms -whether they need them or not.

‘I had posters from last year,’ Lee said. ‘But I wanted more.’

The Beyond the Wall company runs stores in cities and college towns across the nation but has made a name for itself with SU students and others by traveling to campuses where it doesn’t exist year-round.

Ian Mott, one of the Beyond the Wall sales representatives working the sale at the Goldstein Auditorium lobby yesterday, had already hit four other campuses for poster sales before arriving in Syracuse yesterday.

‘We were at Utica College, then helping a friend the other day at the University at Buffalo, and we were also at Radford and the University of Richmond,’ Mott said. ‘I’m from Florida. This is a hike.’

Other than having trouble maneuvering the one-way streets while trying to find Schine, Mott says his trip to Syracuse has been a pleasant one. He and other traveling sales representatives will be running the sales held around campus.

‘The university’s been pretty helpful so far,’ he said.

As well it should be. The university bookstore gets a percentage of all profits Beyond the Wall makes during its sales on campus.

Mireya Porter, merchandise division manager for the SU Bookstore, set up the partnership with Beyond the Wall after the bookstore had decided it was no longer profitable for it to find room for the posters in the store.

‘We had limited space,’ Porter said. ‘(Beyond the Wall) allows a very large inventory of images to come onto campus – especially at the time of year when students are moving into their dorms.’

Porter also says she enjoys the partnership with Beyond the Wall because of the young staff members that it employs.

‘They know the images that are popular,’ she said. ‘They can relate to what our students are looking for, and quite well. They bring in a very large selection with everything from fine arts to oversized movie posters and popular culture images of rock and hip-hop stars. It’s a very nice selection.’

Still, Mott is a little confused about one thing: With the university sharing the profits, why did SU decide to place the sale in the Goldstein Auditorium lobby?

‘We are crammed in this hallway,’ he said. ‘We’ll see how it goes. It’s going to be a little rough because we don’t have a stage and we don’t have the foot traffic we were hoping for. This definitely cuts down our sales compared to if we were in the main lobby.’

Nonetheless, Mott has been surprised by the number of students who have made the trip to the lobby. He credits the upperclassmen for remembering the sales location from previous years and says he just hopes the freshmen figure it out on their own.

‘So far, it’s been a pretty decent crowd, especially for the location,’ Mott said.

Kimberly Crossman, a junior biology major, and Cherie Peters, a senior history major, are two upperclassmen who returned to this year’s sale. For them, simply attending the poster sale each year has become somewhat of a habit.

‘We’re just killing time,’ Crossman said. ‘We might buy something. I’ve bought something every year before.’

Though Peters said she wasn’t necessarily going to buy anything, she said she expected many freshmen would because of the barren walls in the dorms.

‘They need to decorate their rooms,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a lot of posters in my room.’

Though Mott understands it may take some time for the freshmen to catch on to the locale of the sale, he, too, expects that the freshmen will soon be perusing his posters alongside the upperclassmen.

‘I always had lots of posters when I was, like, 18, 19,’ he said. ‘I’m 28 now and I still have my room covered in posters. No one wants bare walls. That’s boring.’

Published on August 30, 2004 at 12:00 pm