We know the stress of midterms, finals, and clicking "enroll" right at 8 A.M. in order to get the class schedule you worked so hard to perfect, but the apartment search stress is way greater than the rest. I pretty much procrastinate on everything, but this year I started my apartment search early. Starting three weeks earlier than I had the previous year, I had all of the options laid out for my possible roommates and I to look over. Thinking it would go smoothly was naive of me, making apartment searching harder than I thought.
Moving in on August 27th and getting
an email, letter, and fax on September 1st from the leasing office
hassling you to resign for next year.
When you come to realize that the absurd amount of freshman are taking over all of the best apartments.
Getting to the leasing office six hours before they open and there are already 60 people in line.
When you finally find a place that all of your roommates agree on living and the only spots available are on the waitlist.
The feeling of trying to get a four bedroom apartment, but you have five people in your friend group.
Trying to find a place that is close enough to everyone’s classes even though all of your roommates have completely different majors in four completely different locations on campus.
Knowing the leasing office opens at 9 A.M., but people are starting to line up at 11 P.M. the night before.
Thinking about how simple life was when you lived in your on-campus dorm, without a care in the world about finding parking on campus at 9 A.M. or paying a ridiculously high utility bill each month.
When you think you finally find the perfect place, but then you find out the deposit is almost as much as your tuition.
When you need all future tenants in order to tour a town home, but half of them are M.I.A. so you have to find other random friends that look like them to fill in, in hopes the relator won’t notice.
The feeling you get when you finally sign a lease that leads to your future home, even if you don't get to move in for another ten months.
No matter how early I look for apartments, early never seems to be early enough. It's the end of November and I still haven't signed a lease for next year, so I'll have to save popping open a champaign bottle for another day.
