Editorial: Learning from living with roommates
Going home over the summer can be an easy thing to get comfortable with. What can I say — clean laundry, free food and access to a car!
However, with this luxury lifestyle there always comes a time when you get to switch your parents as roommates for friends.
As a first-time apartment or house renter knowing who you can and can’t live with can be a difficult situation to understand.
I can confidently say there are many friends I would love to live with but our friendship would not be the same if we decided to do so.
The benefit of university is that the roommate process can be trial and error over three years.
There is no written rule that you need to stay in the same place every year.
The only rule to follow is that you feel comfortable in the space you live in.
Further, you don’t need to be best friends with your roommates. I learned this the hard way in my first year of living off campus by living with my small tight knit friend group which never ended well for anyone.
After this year, I concluded that living with a small group of girls probably wasn’t the best idea — the peace and quiet was totally worth it but it was difficult to balance a healthy friend/roommate lifestyle.
Proceeding into my second year of living off campus, I decided to rework my living situation and move into a house with four other girls.
After this move I realized that an important aspect of you and your roommates is your partying schedule can run similar to each other as well as living with people who put as much work into school as you do.
It is super easy to get side-tracked from what you are in university to do if you don’t live with like-minded people.
I have found that last year and moving into this current year I have felt very comfortable and content with the roommates I have lived with.
We set boundaries at the beginning of the year which allowed everyone to get a say in what they wanted out of the house before it was too late. As loud as they are, I love them to death and couldn’t have done a lot without their support.
