To all of those people who have just committed to college: welcome. Some of you might be thinking about roommates, parties, and whatever. The others might be like me and have the realization, “oh s*** I am actually going to college, what do I do now? I need my mom for literally everything. I can’t cook, clean, do laundry, how am I going to SURVIVE?”

Well, if you’re like that now, have no fear because I am here to help. Use this article as a guide to surviving college, as there are plenty of little anecdotes from my first semester at the University of Delaware in here. If you’re worried about rooming and housing and the fun stuff of college still, continue reading because you might want to use this as a guide on how to survive.

1. Doing laundry: How and Why.

First, Tide Pods are my favorite cleaning supply of college. Buy these and half the stress of figuring out how to do laundry is gone. All you do is put one or two in depending on how big your load is right before you load your clothes in, and you’re done. The next part is, figuring out how to use the machines. That’s different for every school and every dorm, in my dorm there are signs of how to work the machines. If your dorm doesn’t have that, then make one of your new college friends be the test dummy, and have them help you when you do yours. You can probably google it in all honesty because every machine is different.

Now, if you’re lazy like me and will go seventeen days without doing your laundry, don’t do that. You’ll run out of clothes, room in your hamper, and you’ll end up spending a lot of money on laundry one week. I did that once and had to do laundry on one of my busiest days of the week because I kept on pushing it off. That’s not ideal. If you’re like me and might do that, make it an event on your phone to do your laundry at least once a week. Most people do it on the weekends, I did it on Mondays because I only had one class and it was an 8 am Calculus Class, so I had to find ways to fill my time for the rest of the day while everyone else was in class.

Why do you need to do your laundry? To have clean clothes that smell good and look good because you never know when some attractive person is going to ask you out on a date. If you run out of cute outfits, and the date goes poorly, that’s your fault, not theirs.

2. Cooking: you can avoid it!

I am the worst cook known to man, and I burn everything I try to create. You do not want me in the kitchen, as I have burnt countless bags of popcorn, countless pizza bites, mozzarella sticks, even water. You name it, I’ve probably burnt it. If you’re like me and cannot cook to save one’s life, there is a solution for you. First, there are dining halls and the food is not that bad. I actually like it most days and use my unlimited meal plan there generously.

There are take-out and delivery, that is if you want to spend some of your own cash. I personally eat if not all, about 90% of my meals in the dining hall because it is dependable food that feeds me. Also, there are going to be opportunities for free food all around campus, if you hear about them, go to them. These are fun, and free food is always good food.

3. Cleaning: a chore that I hate to do, but it can be fun!

Cleaning is a task that I dread doing, and that I must do. If you’re like me, and you hate cleaning your room, then college is going to be a ball. First, talk to your roommate about how you guys want to keep your room. If you’re both okay with it being messy from time to time, good because it most likely will be with the chaos known as college.

Set aside a day, a night, or half a day for cleaning, whether it’s Sundays or Wednesday nights, do this and just clean your room. Take out the garbage, yes you have to do that in college, I know... shocker, make your beds, and do whatever else it takes to make your room clean. I know this can be boring, so while you’re doing this listen to music it lessens the pain so much. At least, in my opinion, it does.

Overall, here are the basics of how to be an adult and doing the human needs in college. Once you begin to do it, it’s not that hard and you’re slowly walking into adulthood with college. One day, hopefully, I’ll learn how to cook, and I won’t need to like the dining hall food.