In December of 2013, my two friends and future roommates and I had to be quick to sign up for an apartment this year at Campus View. This meant I had to take an extra half hour or so from packing to sign up and put a down payment on my share of the apartment. With a nine-month lease, I’d be paying about $45 more than my twelve-month roommates. However, since I go home during the summer, I wasn’t looking to stay there for an extra three months. 

Deciding on a place to live can be confusing and even frustrating at times, so it’s important to know what to look for.

Chances are there’s no abundance of available spaces left at this point. So why write about this now? Well, I was recently eating lunch with a fellow music major and we were speaking about where we were living and why. The conversation reminded me of several other instances where I listened to someone either give their approval or complain about their living quarters and express their feelings about the future.

This is why it’s important to not procrastinate when you are deciding on living arrangements. Many places will require you to have your roommates selected, so it’s also important to have roommates you know you will get along with, because they’ll be with you for the year. 

I remember my freshman year put me in a slightly bigger dorm room with three other guys. It wasn’t unbearable, but our personalities and social differences often drove me to the library for quiet and occasionally kept me awake slightly longer than I would have liked. Granted, there’s not much you can do about that scenario, which is why you must be smart about who you choose to room with in your later years.

While this is completely of your choosing, it’s typically more advantageous to live closer to campus if you’re living off campus, because you can’t always count on your car to work for you all the time. They overheat in the summer, they freeze and skid in the winter. What’s your alternative? If you’re close enough, walk. If not, take the bus. Either way, exactly how much longer would that take you?

In a perfect world, we could all live in the environment we so choose, but that’s not the case. We need to take into account the possibilities of something not going the way we want it to, and working around or with it. There is no such thing as the perfect apartment or dorm, but what really counts is knowing what to look for and how we can cope with any problems that arise.   

[email protected]