Accommodation in University

I go to university in a big city so there are plenty of places to choose from to live. One choice is Residence, otherwise known as Dorm. There, you will find a species of animal referred to as the Residential Advisor, RA.

Normally I wouldn’t have had much to do with an RA. I thought of them as being grumpy or nerdy monitors, yelling at people to turn the music down, and making sure drinking and smoking didn’t get out of hand. Killers of all that was fun and good. But I didn’t think of them as being there to guide us first years, be a mentor and help with inevitable stresses and conflicts.

Then my roommate went missing; the last time I saw him, he was drunk out of his mind. So I knocked on my RA’s door at 3 am and he called the police. It might seem unusual that he would do that for an 18 year old first year student who was only missing for a few hours. But three weeks before, a senior student had been abducted and murdered. The security around the university increased greatly. They put extra lights up and extra security guards on duty. There was a lot of panic and parents were emailing their kids to not leave their rooms. Security even devised a system where you could register your cell phone and they would send out mass text messages with any security alerts. We haven't had any incidents since then, but every now and again our parents see one on the TV from somewhere else, and we all get calls asking us if we're OK and telling us never to go out after dark. Trouble is, a couple of horrendous incidents have happened in lectures, so your parents don't know what to tell you to not do.

After this experience with my RA (by the way, my roommate was found), I got to know him well and went to him a few times when I needed help. So if you have an RA, you might be surprised how much he or she can help. They have been through it all before and it is fresh in their mind. Use that to your advantage if you can.

Anyway, second year, most of us were looking for off-campus accommodation. It's a big city, so there are lots of choices. What you do find, though, is that as you walk from outside towards the University, the rent jumps by hundreds of dollars in ten blocks. It’s very annoying because you know you can live somewhere further away for half the price but then you would have to take the bus or drive to class every day and pay for parking. Buses are never there when they're supposed to be, or when you need them, and student parking spaces can be further away from where you need to go than some people's apartments are. It's a dilemma.

I ended up in a house of four. At first we all had a good time, but then things changed. One guy was very selfish and stubborn; he thought since he paid to rent his room, he could do whatever he liked and bring in whoever he wanted. So he would bring drug dealer type people home and we didn’t want them in our house. We didn’t even know their names because he called each one “John”. A lot of things would happen that we weren’t ok with, but each time we tried to talk to him about it, he would say “I pay my share of the rent so I can do this”.

Another guy in the house drove me nuts because his parents owned the house that we lived in; they bought it for him and his friends to live in while they went to school. But this guy thought that just because his parents owned the place, he should always get the last word and his way about everything. It annoyed me because we were paying rent and he was not.

This year, I'm back in the dorm, and I have a whole different perspective on roommate problems because I am an RA myself. I get called on all the time to mediate disagreements and I can’t help but think to myself, grow up guys. Two of the guys on my floor who were put together are polar opposites. They have many different beliefs which made it difficult to get along, to start with. One didn’t drink because of his religion; he went to bed at a certain time and that sort of thing. Not so the other one, and it became a battle of epic proportions. It got so bad that they had schedules when the window could be open, when the window could be shut, when the lights could be on and when the lights should be off. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and put them in different rooms.

Things like this do happen. Having roommates can be either a great situation or awful. But most people find that most of the time, if they occasionally think about how best to get along, it works just fine.