Now that I’m in my final year at Fairfield and I look back at my four years, it is easy to glorify what life was like when I lived in the dormitories.

Dorms have their benefits — there are more common areas, you see different people when you walk down the hall to go to the bathroom and there is a closer community that organizes and attends events.

Once you finish living in a dorm, though, you forget all of the things that you could not stand about living in one.

For starters, you will not need all of those common areas anymore, and they were always loud and crowded. If you live in an apartment like I have for the last two years, you will appreciate having your own living area for when you need a change of scenery from your room. You may only be seeing the same three or five people that you are living with now, but you will reach a point like me where you will not mind.

In fact, once you wear pajamas in common areas without feeling self-conscious, you will realize that you do not miss the dorms all that much.

Similarly, although it takes a while to get used to seeing the same faces in your apartment and not in your hallway, it will become a blessing. When my friends and I moved into an on-campus apartment, we thought that we would miss seeing different people on the way to the common bathroom. I will admit — you do feel isolated at times in an apartment. However, you will gladly sacrifice seeing different faces when you no longer have to wear shower shoes. Also, nothing compares to only sharing a bathroom with several people rather than an entire floor.

Remember when you went to the bathroom and every shower was occupied and every stall was broken?

When you are no longer living in a dorm, you may miss the close-knit community events that your dorm hosted. Even if you live on-campus in an apartment, the events are not nearly the same. I will attest that the events were the best part of dorm life, but now that you have left and are likely an upperclassman, you — or one of your friends — probably have a car. Instead of relying on dorm events for entertainment on the weekends, you can have off-campus adventures.

Now, you will no longer have dry spells on weekends where absolutely nothing is happening.

There are undoubtedly incredible aspects about living in dorms. I would not trade my first two years in the Fairfield dorms for anything; and I know people who either left them after freshman year or chose to commute. It is inevitable that we will look back at our time in dorms more fondly now. As we prepare for the next stage in our lives — “adulthood” — it can only be expected that we will reflect on a time in our lives when our biggest fear was not knowing where our rooms were on Move-In Day.

Instead, we should rejoice that soon, we will never have to worry about another 90-degree or torrentially raining Move-In Day.