The following contribution is from another author.
When you’re in college, you’re not just thinking about the fun you’re having and all those college conveniences; usually, you’re also thinking about how you can start your career, and the best way to go about that (after all, you’re literally going to uni because of this). You want to build a career, and that starts with your academic career, but all of that technically begins in your student career, though. And it’s very easy to choose a college house based on the version of student life that exists in everyone’s head before the semester starts.
The fun version. The one where the house is full of friends, the rent seems manageable, the campus is “close enough”, and nobody at least seems loud or gross. Even when it comes to college dorms, theres still this fun idea of making friends, posters all over the wall, just hanging out, being care-free, well, except for grades, of course. While yes, that idea in your head is honestly a lot of fun, no denying that, it’s still challenging to say the least here. Because real life very rarely goes the way you think, especially if theres so many others involved.
Like, your dorm mate or housemates could be loud, disgusting, rude, they don’t care about your sleep schedule, no one wants that for themselves. So lack of sleep, lack of a quiet area to work, study, whatever else, well, that does affect your life, therefore that affects your grades and your career.
A Bad Commute Can Turn Ambition into a Whole Production
Plenty of students are ambitious in theory. They want the internship. They want the work experience. They want the good reference, the campus job, the coffee meeting with someone useful, the early shift that looks good on a resume. It makes sense to want that, and it makes sense to want to be ambitious like that. But that can also come back to bite you.
But ambition gets a lot harder when every opportunity comes with a miserable journey attached to it. A 20-minute walk sounds nice in August. By November, when it’s dark too early and cold, well, that walk sounds horrible, and you need to do it daily. So, when you’re thinking of off campus housing, you’re going ot need to be realistic, like really upfront and realistic. Like what can you not only manage, but manage without stress? Without being miserable?
The Housing Needs to Survive Finals Week
Oh, not just finals week, but interview season too (be it jobs or internships). But seriously, though, there is nothing quite like trying to sound calm and employable on a video interview while a roommate is cooking loudly. or trying to write a cover letter while someone in the next room is arguing on speakerphone.
Same for finals week, maybe you care about your grades, but maybe your roommate or the person in the next room over doesn’t care about theirs. So then it’s a loud, uncomfortable environment where you can’t work, you can’t study, you can’t apply for anything comfortable, so you might as well live in the library in that case.
Choose for the Life that’s Coming
Yes, you should have fun, you should have a lot of fun, you should hopefully like whoever you live with, too. But at the same time, though you ned to be realistic, you need to actually think about your future and what comes ahead.
