After freshmen year, the dorm life was not for me. I needed my own living space. I decided to find a place to live, which ended up being 20 minutes out of town. I was glad to get away from the city and out of a tiny dorm room into a three-bedroom house. I've been in off-campus housing the past two years and I love it, but there are some things I wish someone would have told me beforehand.
Say goodbye to decent parking. When you live on campus at the University of Central Arkansas, you get a green parking sticker which means you get dibs on the parking spots at the front, outlined in green. When you live off campus, you get a purple sticker which means hello to the back of the parking lot. You'd think I'd be in better shape from walking 10 minutes through the parking lot every day, but oh well.
I feel like I'm not in the loop anymore. When I lived on campus, I felt like I knew every time a leaf fell. My friends and I would just roam the campus and find things to do and witness everything going on but now, I'm only on campus when I have class or a meeting and I receive an email from the University if something interesting happened. I don't get to see all the friends I've made due to differing schedules and not living right beside one another anymore. It's a real bummer sometimes.
Forget a book? Looks like you have two choices now. Go to class late with your books, or go to class on time without your books. Now that you're off campus, you can't just run back to your dorm and grab it real quick. You have to walk all the way back to your car, drive back to your place fighting traffic, grab your things and drive all the way back to campus. Now that you're running late, good luck finding a parking spot. You've managed to make it to class a few minutes late, better hope your professor isn't one of those that likes to embarrass students for being late.
Don't get me wrong, living off campus has its perks – You don't have to worry about the fire alarm going off once a week, mandatory hall meetings, communal bathrooms, and most importantly, you're away from campus. You're able to take a break from the stress of school and relax without seeing the math and science buildings out your window.
