An Easy Way to Save

An easy way to save money – fix things yourself!

It is obvious that in university, people will play sports indoors, wrestle indoors, throw things, and goof-off. Along with this comes the unfortunate occurrence of holes in the drywall of your residence. After a few crazy nights, and three gaping holes in our walls, my roommates and I quickly learned how to patch drywall. The university charges $150 per hole to have them fixed and quite frankly, we as university students could not afford that.

We went to the hardware store and bought a can of drywall filler for $5.00 and a spreader for $1.00. None of us knew anything about drywall, but we heard it was quite simple; all you have to do is spread some filler over the hole, smooth it out, and you are done. That is exactly what we did, and fortunately it looked great. Shortly after, we went around and patched all of our friends holes, saving ourselves tons of money, and the final count of holes filled that year was 16. At $150 per hole, that is a lot of money saved.

So why are we so excited about saving money by fixing things ourselves? Because here, everything is a ripoff. Clothes and parking cost too much, roommate matching costs $50, textbooks cost a fortune. They make you buy the whole pack when you only need one of the books. They change the editions so you can’t buy used ones. And often, they require new texts with new authors so you can’t use the old ones. The profs told us this on the first day. They said “make it easier on yourself and buy the proper text or you won't be able to follow along”. Yeah well it’s not them paying for it, now is it?

Living on your own is expensive. My dad thinks we have it easier than others because residence is paid for. But one of my friends is in an apartment and he pays $300/month. I pay $700/mo for my share and it’s $2100 total for our whole unit which three of us share.

Next year I will live off-campus for sure. I know I will have to pay for my own groceries whereas now, I have a meal plan. But I still think it will be a lot cheaper.

So yes, I am happy when I can fix things myself. Maybe I should start a business doing just that.

Frosh Week Sucked!

I thought Frosh week would be better. What it was portrayed as was not what it was like at all. It was kind of boring.

I felt that the leaders treated us like we were five. We went to the casino and when we were ready to leave, we told the leaders we were going to go back by taxi instead of waiting for the bus. They wouldn't let us and told us that if we wanted to go by taxi, we would have to have two guys with us. They would also check our bags everytime we got on the bus which annoyed me greatly.

Our move in date to residence was two days after frosh week had started. So we missed two days of meeting people. It made it really hard because everyone had already formed groups of friends. We missed the ice breaker activities so we didn't even know anybody's names. There were different cheers for different groups; everyone would start yelling cheers and we wouldn't know what to do because we didn't know the cheers. We missed the boat trip which was supposed to be really fun. And our schedule was already picked out for us so we couldn't even choose what we wanted to do.

If I had known it was going to be like this, I would have stayed with my aunt and uncle so I could have participated in the activities from the start. Frosh week probably would have been fun if I had done that.