Dorm life!

[olstyn]

Living on campus can be good or bad. My first year roommate is still my friend 15+ years later. On the other hand, another friend of mine has some serious horror stories; his first roommate smoked both pot and cigarettes in their room no matter how much he was asked to stop, and was just generally an all-around pain to live with otherwise. Same guy's roommate 2nd year was mildly creepy and always cooking some weird-smelling dish in their room. That's the risk; you never know what you're going to get - could be great, could be awful, could be indifferent.

Honestly, there are times when I miss the community aspect of it, and especially the easy access friends thing, as others have mentioned. That said, I do not miss dorm food even a little bit.

In my personal experience, the good stuff was *mostly* worth dealing with the bad, and I did it for the first 3 years, though the 2nd and 3rd years I had a room to myself. 4th year I moved into an apartment with a couple of friends, and that worked out pretty well most of the time, but it had its own pitfalls. One of the three of us sharing the apartment was REALLY bad about cleaning up after himself, NEVER took his turn cleaning the bathroom, etc, and the other two got pretty passive aggresive about it at times, which resulted in everyone involved being pretty miserable for a while. Eventually we'd give up and do the cleaning, but it always felt like letting him win, which sucked, even if the end result was having somewhere clean to live again.

Oddly enough, I'm still friends with the "guilty" party of the cleaning situation, but I haven't lived with him for something like 8 or 9 years now - it's a lot easier to be friendly when there's no seething undertone of annoyance.

No housing situation will ever be perfect, and I think most people eventually end up living off campus at some point in their college careers. That said, IMO it makes sense to live on campus for your first year, both just for the experience of it and so that you can kind of get your bearings at school and in a new city without having to worry about all the stuff that goes with being truly out on your own right away. If you live in the dorms, you get meals prepared for you, you only have to pay rent on a per-semester basis, usually rolled into the same bill as your tuition, and things are generally easy (no paying monthly utility bills, etc). Even if your roommate situation isn't what you'd like, you're just about guaranteed to meet lots of people you'll enjoy, and that's a big benefit.