The College Collective

I don’t mean the flakes you get in your hair, that’s easy to take care of. But fickle, indecisive people can’t be washed away with Head & Shoulders, and cause a lot more problems in your life. Today I would like to talk about how you should prepare yourself for off-campus housing and how to minimize the number of problems that will arise.

While dorming is an essential part of the college experience, sooner or later you get sick of seeing all of your friends all the time in all their various states of sobriety and inebriated confusion. Sooner or later, you’ll have your fill of the slimy walls of the communal showers, and the vomit stains on the communal toilets…You get the point.

Renting a house or apartment with a bunch of friends is also an essential part of most college experiences, and good practice in case you want to engage in the Friends type lifestyle in the future to delay independent adulthood further. Many of you will not know difficulties you will face in embarking upon this quest for the perfect house and perfect housemates, and as someone who weathered the ordeal twice over, I’m here to warn (and hopefully guide) you through it.

1. Start very early: begin looking around for possible places to live as early as six months before you have to move out of dorms, landlords can begin making postings quite early, so keep an eye out for listings in your college newspapers, local newspapers, craigslist, and facebook network (finally, some use for this website before encourage the growth of our voyeuristic tastes)

2. Keep many options: many places will look good, so consider all of them, you’re not the only one looking for the perfect home, and chances are someone will snatch it up before you.

3.  Don’t let friendship get in the way: don’t hesitate to be absolutely honest with friends, and make sure you ask them to do the same. Just because you have a great time hanging out with someone doesn’t necessarily mean you’re compatible to live together, if this person is a forgetful, slovenly person who is bad with money and never cleans, no matter how much you love him or her, it is probably best to decline on the possibility of living together without hard feelings. Remember, no hard feelings!

4. (Pay attention to this one) Don’t take “Yes” for an answer: I know this sounds strange, but just because someone says they’ll be down with living with you doesn’t mean they haven’t said yes to someone else (or several other people), and it doesn’t mean they won’t realize they have no money the next day, and it doesn’t mean they won’t realize they’d rather dorm instead, and it doesn’t mean they won’t fall in love and decide to move in with their significant other instead, and it doesn’t mean you and your friend won’t have a terrible fight and realize that you can’t live under the same roof. Additionally, just because a landlord says a house is yours doesn’t mean he or she might not decide to rent it to someone else instead for whatever reason the next day. (I would like to mention that all these theoretical examples are in fact true stories from my life and the lives of some of my unfortunate friends)

4. Have a Plan B (and C, and D, and E….): Even after you triple-crosscheck your plan, something is bound to go awry (sorry, this typically true), so make sure you have other people you can ask to live with, and other houses you can look to.

5. Have enough money to put down the security deposit: the surest way of snagging the house before someone else is to have the security deposit ready. So gather up your funds as quickly as possible as the time for your final selection draws near, so you can put down the payment and secure your crib for the coming school year as quickly as possible, because typically the landlord is obliged to give the house to the first person who produces the security deposit in whole.

6. And lastly…don’t give up! Things will go wrong, but as long as you keep trying to make something work, something is bound to work out for you in the end.

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