Living on campus far transcends living at home while in college for multiple reasons.
Despite that, many people are unaware of them. Instead, most people are conscious of the benefits that come with living off campus: cost of living is cheaper and you can be close to loved ones.
With college tuition being so expensive and college itself being so stressful, I understand the desire to save money and feel supported. Everyone does because we all share in this same desire. All people also want to have the full college experience though, and thus should consider dorm life.
Dorm life rules for the following reasons:
1. There are no grown-up rules. Well, unless you have lame roommates. For those with cool roommates, you can throw a party at any given time, drink whenever you want (I strongly suggest making Wine Wednesday a thing), come and go as you please, while getting away with a messy room and a high pile of laundry. Because parents rarely make cool roommates, not all of this can be done at home.
2. You never feel lonely. It’s next to impossible because there are so many people around you at all times. Plus, I have found that just because you can be closer in proximity to family if you choose to live at home, doesn’t mean you actually will be. My parents, like many, work so much that I rarely see them even if I’m home. Consequently, when I attended a college close to home and full of commuters, I often felt inclined to go home on the weekends, but only to find I felt just as alone, or even more alone than before.
3. You are given the freedom to decorate how you want for the first time. This means you can stream Christmas lights year-round and put up those posters promoting your favorite beers. And if you’re like two of my friends, you might even paint your walls an obnoxious teal color. Why? Because you can. Even if you’re allowed to do this at your parents house, it’s weird. And in all seriousness, most of us are not.
4. It’s convenient. You can: roll out of bed and walk to class and practice, take care of residency/admissions’ issues the day you’re made aware of them and meet those friends who only ever give you 5 minutes of notice for lunch. If you commute from home, inconvenience will limit you from doing any of this with ease.
5. You learn your campus. Being on campus more, you’ll notice the quality of the new track and football field, the architecture of the Performing Arts Center, the detail in the student-created statues and sculptures, the character of the oldest-standing academic building named after the first president, the commemoration that lies in the memorials and the picture-perfect scene created when walkways are filled with a diverse population of students. In recognizing the beauty of your campus, you are able to fully appreciate it. Living at home means you spend less time on campus, and thus have less time to appreciate your campus’s aesthetic value.
6. You develop creativity. When you have time and space–and throw a bunch of twenty-year-olds into the mix–you can make games to play and pranks to pull in the room and/or hallways. Let’s face it–most parents won’t be cool with sliding down the stairs on a mattress or putting obscene post-its on the neighbor’s door.
7. It allows you to make the most of frustrating circumstances. When the fire alarm sounds and you venture out into freezing cold weather with no shoes on after making the false assumption it’s only a drill, you’ll see you’re not alone, and thus able to make light of the situation.
Also, when you discover there are people other than you who waited until the last minute to both charge their laptop and read for tomorrow’s class when the power suddenly went out, you’ll find it more comical. Seeing first-hand that others go through the same unfortunate experiences that we do makes them easier to deal with and take lightly. Unless you have a sibling close in age and enrolled in college, you can’t see what other college students experience.
As you can see, there are many benefits that can only be experienced by living on campus. Living off campus will increase the chances of missing out on these awesome things, as well as getting the full college experience.
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*Section Photo credit to and Featured Photo (above) credit to charlesandhudson.com.
