Picture this: you’re a nervous yet excited young senior in high school, about to venture off to college and start your new totally awesome chapter in life. You and your future roommate found each other on Facebook and are already planning out cute little decorations and a color scheme for your dorm room. But during this time, a lingering fear that your room assignment will not end up as planned sits in the back of your mind.

Numerous students have frantically posted in the Facebook group about the world-shattering, life ending, college experience crushing room assignment- also known as Supplemental Housing. Supplemental housing can be described as overflow housing where they take a common room and transform it into a dorm with more than two people. These rooms range from holding four to eight people, some with their own bathroom, some without, and overall have always been seen as a worst-case scenario.

So the day arrives where you get your room assignment email and your worst fear quickly spirals into your reality. You had been assigned to a Supplemental room. You’re still with your original roommate, but now paired and forced to live with two more randoms. Not to mention, one of those randoms just so happens to be a girl you briefly talked to through Facebook but stopped answering after a while… oops, awkward - love you Bri.

All in all, you are devastated, your college experience will be ruined by living in bunk beds in very small quarters with three other people. But wait! Something totally unexpected happens and you soon find out that this - what seemed to be an unfortunate event actually turned out to be the best thing that could have ever happened to you in college.

This is exactly how my weeks before college unraveled, and now after experiencing living in Supplemental housing, I would like to put all of the Supplemental housing haters to shame and say it was literally amazing.

Yes, a little quiet and weird at first, but living figuratively and literally on top of each other - we had bunk beds - the weirdness had to be overcome and fast. We basically had no option but to get along, but with these girls, getting along was no hard task. I really do not know how we got so lucky to all get along, but we did and on day one of our freshman year of college, our brand new little seed of forced friendship sprouted into something beautiful - The Core Four.

Our four-person Supplemental room was really not that big at all, had no bathroom, always smelled kind of funky, and was commonly mistaken for the laundry room. Many times people would freely waltz in with their laundry and just stop and stare at us in silence before turning to walk out embarrassed and confused. Pretty funny if you ask me. At one time we had to actually write out signs on our door saying NOT THE LAUNDRY ROOM!!!

After living a semester with bunk beds, we also took it upon ourselves to rearrange our room and put all four beds on the floor. Of course, there was no prior measuring to see if this would even work, but hey why not just spontaneously go for it, right? The second semester rolled around and our new totally awesome set up allowed us to see everyone at all times because our beds were right across from each other literally almost touching. “Can you imagine if we had these like this first semester? That would have been so awkward because I literally have no option but to stare at you all when I look up.” But it was okay then because we were already so weirdly close that a little unexpected morning staring contest as we woke up didn’t scare anyone off, only made us laugh.

Supplemental did not only bring me my best friends, but it allowed us to be friends with each other’s friends also. One of us had a few guy friends from home at school, which allowed us to become friends with their whole guy friend group - shout out to The Penthouse. Our friendship with these guys really took off the second semester when the Core Four decided to start hosting some killer Supplemental Parties, as we called them. Although I say, killer, these parties were not exactly parties because our room lacked just that - room. But ignoring that factor of it, these little get-togethers we had are some of our absolute favorite memories from our Supplemental room, and ones we still continue to talk about today.

Our freshman year Supplemental room really made our college experience amazing, as we still all live together and continue to make endless memories. If I could go back and talk to little pre-college nervous me, I would tell her not to be upset about getting assigned to a Supplemental room. What seemed like such terrible news at the time, honestly was a Godsend and set me up with some friends I know will be my friends forever. Thank you Supplemental, and thank you - you know who you are - for becoming some of the greatest people in my life.