Dorms usually comes wired internet, at least they do here.
We don't have dorms here... :/
...and what I meant was that I need to go online for a personal password (every student gets one), change the password, download and install
wpa_supplicant along with a preconfigured configuration file, enter my new password into the configuration file, and finally run the command:
wpa_supplicant -Dwext -ieth1 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B
...in order to access their wifi...
Edit: Oh, and the new password didn't get activated until an hour had passed, which they naturally didn't tell anyone, leaving us to think that the wifi was broken as nobody new had access to it (and the professor didn't have a clue).