Kevin Kan | Staff Illustrator

Dear Scene,

It’s getting to that point in the semester where I need to figure out where to live next year, and I’m overwhelmed — I feel like I don’t know enough about my options to make a decision. Please help!

–  Anxious Apartment-hunter

Dear Anxious Apartment-hunter,

If you are nervous about finding housing, on campus or off, fear no longer! As someone who has taken pride in finding housing for my group for the past two years, including both on-campus housing and off-campus housing, I have suffered for you and can now impart my wisdom. I have also had to do my fair share of sorting through roommate kerfuffles, including deciding who to live with and working through subleasing agreements for roommates studying abroad.

If you are hoping to live on campus, read more here:

While your first-year dorm assignment is fairly arbitrary, it’s nice to have more say in the matter of where you will live and who you live with, beginning with sophomore year. My friends and I decided that we wanted to live on the 40 again, as long as we got singles and had a common room. I think it was very useful to establish a list of priorities going into the housing process, because when it comes time to shop for a suite on the housing portal, it’s very difficult to make big decisions on the fly without more and more suites being taken off the market by the second. For example, we tried to plan ahead for a variety of scenarios. We decided that we wanted to live in any building on the South 40 as long as we were in modern singles, and we had a list of rankings of buildings that fell within that category. We also knew that we would pick the Village over living in a traditional dorm or modern doubles. However, this part of the decision is less relevant now that sophomores will also be required to live on the 40. Regardless, I’d still highly recommend talking with your roomies, establishing what you are looking for, and ranking the qualities of each possible suite by their importance. 

If you are hoping to live off campus, read more here:

The number of options for junior-year housing and beyond can be overwhelming. However, all of your issues can be resolved simply by going to club mixers and other parties hosted by upperclassmen. Who would have thought that the solution to this problem would come back to being a social butterfly? But alas, here we are. One could go the responsible route and get in contact with a landlord and ask to see properties in the area. Or, one could simply reflect on all of the dirty basements that they spent countless hours in first-year and the apartments they saw through pre-games hosted at upperclassmen’s apartments. If you were considering being a hermit crab this year and hiding from all your friends, take this as your motivation to socialize: If you don’t, you are creating more work for yourself when it comes to finding a place to live. 

My friends and I decided to take over the current unofficial house for one of our club sports teams next year. I ended up being the organizer for this, asking my friend who currently lives in the house an abundance of questions about her apartment and having her put me in contact with her landlord. She gave me and all of my friends a tour of her apartment during a team potluck. This was a win-win for both of us, because the landlord offered to give her a bonus for helping them find new tenants, and I had to do less work to get the application information for my future home. 

Then, I had to work with my friends to figure out our study-abroad situations, putting a little bit of pressure on them to meet with their advisors and make decisions earlier so that we could figure out who our subletters would be for each semester. My biggest piece of advice here is to make decisions early — it worked well for my group to set a deadline for ourselves to make a study-abroad decision by Fall Break of the year before we hoped to live in the apartment, especially because people had more time to talk to their parents and fill out applications at that time. 

Another reason I am emphasizing the importance of starting early on the housing process for off-campus junior housing is that there is a chain of effects when someone changes their study-abroad plans. One of the original members of our housing group realized that she had to switch from going in the fall to going in the spring, which meant that we had one too many people for one semester and one too few for the other. Dealing with this required a series of one-on-one conversations before talking with the full group, and setting up times to meet to have these conversations was difficult when also juggling normal school work and extracurriculars. I ended up going back to the drawing board to organize our tenancy by semester on a physical piece of paper. It was very useful for me to track what I knew about my future roommates’ housing plans in this way. Give yourself enough time to adapt to new situations without stress!

Your neighbors,

Scene