As the summer begins to approach college students far and wide are trying to make plans for what they’ll do or where they’ll be once the school lets out. Many are looking into getting an internship, others planning just to work and get some extra money in their pocket, others just have no idea because they have too much going on right now during the semester to focus on and can’t worry about the summer just yet; don’t worry all of those are fine answers.

However, as a senior who’s about to graduate and enter the proverbial real world, I do have one piece of advice for you all, and that is try to get your own apartment for a summer. It doesn’t necessarily have to be this summer, but just a summer during your time in college. I’m aware not everyone can afford to get their own apartment, and that’s fine, but I’ve just learned that living on your own teaches you a lot more than you think.

Allow me to elaborate a bit more, I remember when I decided to get my own apartment for the summer at the end of my sophomore year, after living there for about a month I suggested to a friend that she should consider doing the same next year. She then asked why, if college is similar in the experience of helping you become an independent; and she wasn’t wrong, but she wasn’t exactly right either.

Don’t get me wrong, college does teach you a lot about independence, mainly you end up learning that every decision you make is your own and any of the consequences that result from that decision are on you and you alone, you can’t blame anyone else if something goes wrong, so in other words college helps you grow as a person, but having your own apartment helps you grow as an adult, as you’ll learn quite a few things that you might not have learned in college.

I think the biggest eye opening experience I had was when I got fired from my job over the summer. I would like to clarify that it was not my fault, Ohio just has this weird law where you can serve alcohol at 19 but you can’t pour it unless you’re 21, and my employer wasn’t aware of that and so when he found out he had no choice but to let me go because it was a requirement that every server at this restaurant had to be able to pour their own drinks.

Anyways, I got fired, and I was freaking out because I had no idea how I was going to pay my rent, I had no idea how I was going to afford food, and I realized that this was a situation that I never would have had living on campus at college. I don’t have to worry about food because of campus dining and my mom pays the majority of my tuition so I had never been put in a situation like this one. Luckily I found another job and everything was good, I was able to pay my rent on time, and out of fear of anything like that happening again, I just paid off my rent for the rest of the summer as soon as I possibly could.

One other thing I learned about was grocery shopping, mainly that it’s expensive and food goes bad fast, mainly produce. I ended up wasting so much money on vegetables because they would go bad before I could even get the chance to use them. Once again, also something I never learned on campus, because I have a dining hall here that I can go to instead of cooking my own food, even if you buy produce from Thomson, it still doesn’t really hit you because you just look at it as food points as opposed to real money. Honestly, the list of what I’ve learned can go on for a while, so I’ll end it here, and I’ll just reiterate it one more time, it’s not necessary to have your own apartment, but it will help.