College life is hard, exciting, hilarious, and exhausting. Everyone deals with these changes in different ways and admittedly, we’re a weird bunch. But when our parents come to check on us and find us all too complacent with some admittedly strange daily occurrences, it got me thinking how much more we end up tolerating here than we ever imagined while living the cushy home life with our family. Gross bathrooms and loud music are common issues with dorm life, but what about some of the other things happening on a floor of 38 eighteen year olds?
1.Becoming excited about extremely minor things.
This includes the only good shower being open, the elevator already being on your floor, and someone getting a new doorstop. It’s the little things that make life worth living.
2. Getting bored with dining hall food and thus, becoming creative.
If watermelon wasn’t already sweet and fruity, it becomes vastly improved with a good dunk in guava juice.
3. Homework parties
For when you all somehow have a pile of work to do even though classes have only been in session for a week. These generally consist of about 40% productive work (go bears!) and 60% random jokes/philosophical discussions/cookies/group panicking.
4. Meeting new people in the bathroom
When your floor doesn’t have a lounge or even a laundry room, you’re forced to move communal interaction into the only spared shared space: the bathroom. Introducing yourself with a mouth full of toothpaste makes for quite a first impression.
5. Frantically patting your pockets
As a dorm dweller and dining hall patron, you must have your room key and Cal card on you all the time. Both are awkward to keep track of and vitally important to your existence, thus it is only natural to worry every 10 seconds exactly where both of the items have escaped to within your pockets.
6. Outwardly cursing out the marching band
Don’t get me wrong, they’re amazingly talented. But on a Thursday evening numerous swear words are thrown in their direction for the uncanny ability their music possesses to literally seep into every hallway of the dorm for your listening pleasure.
7. Hanging up actual pictures of friends, family, cute pets and basically anything else important to you
With the new age of social media, we have access to any photos we want at any time. But somehow many college students, including myself still see value in creating photo walls in the preciously limited decoration space we have. There’s just something special about a consolidated visual representation of your favorite people.
8. Assimilating to odd smells in the hallway
Dorm halls tend to smell like a delicious mixture of ramen, Axe, and freshly-ground coffee. Can’t imagine a better scent for a living space, can you?
9. Becoming fast friends with someone in class or in the stairwell and never seeing them again
The quirky classmate that you joke around with for an hour lives across campus, so that’s the end of that. It was nice while it lasted, fellow lemming in a 400 person lecture hall.
10. Getting the most out of a dining excursion
Whether it’s bringing a few extra water bottles to fill with milk or smuggling full sandwiches in hordes of napkins, if successful, these shady moves are renowned as resourceful and admirable among college kids.
11. Acquiring an abundance of space-savers that end up taking up a bunch of space
The bunk bed accessory market is being kept in business solely by college students looking to expand upwards and outwards. Bamboo bunk shelves, cloth caddies, tension bar shelves and command hooks are a few of the ingenious solutions we take advantage of to improve our living conditions. No matter that our rooms end up looking like a jigsaw puzzle jammed together by a three year old.
12. Talking to someone you just met for hours
In most aspects of life this might be considered excessive or annoying. In college, we have nothing but time. Seriously tell me your life story. Let’s play cheesy games and chat about politics. We know we have at least one thing in common, right?
