Walking into your first semester of college can be an unnerving, yet extremely exciting experience. With a new campus, new teachers, and new friends, anything can happen! For some, a major component that determines your experience at WashU is the person you spend a large portion of your time with: your roommate. Roommates: you either love them or you don’t. Everyone has a different experience.

Finally feeling settled into your sophomore-year housing? Too bad. It’s time to start thinking about housing for next year! You’ll want to get a head start because, unfortunately, junior year housing is probably the most chaotic. For one, you’ll most likely be transitioning into apartment living for the first time, which is a big change. This comes with an avalanche of options, from locations, to layouts, to buildings.

Yet housing decisions do not need to be so fraught. Not living with your friends is not the end-all, be-all of your housing situation, and your housing situation is not the end-all, be-all of your friendships.

Residential Life has spent the past few months pushing rising upperclassmen to live in the newly constructed Lofts of Washington University. With Round 2 housing decisions released last week, a number of students have been assigned to the newest University apartments—whether their first choice or not—for housing next year.

I have lived on the Delmar Loop in University-owned housing—University Terrace, to be specific—for more than a year and a half. In that time, I have grown fiercely attached to the Loop.

Washington University is proposing an $80 million plan to build apartments with storefronts on the Delmar Loop and Eastgate Avenue. The project is a culmination of years of research with Loop businesses indicating that the area could support more retail and residential development.