The Transition from Student Housing to Rental Property or Home Owning

Dorm Room at
Ohio Northern University.

As my senior year in college draws to an end, it is time to start taking steps out into the real world. For four years I have been living in student housing on campus at Ohio Northern University. This exposed me to several styles of living. The traditional dorm style with a prison cell sized room, bunk beds and communal showers was my first experience living away from home. While it was great at the time, and allowed me to make many lasting friendships, I knew from the get go that this was not the way that I wanted to live past freshman year. The next step in my progression here at Ohio Northern was life in a suite. The suites here at Ohio Northern are essentially two dorm rooms that were combined into one living space. This was the first time I had my own bedroom on campus, and also an attached private bathroom. Space for my roommate and myself was still tight, but the fact that we had our own rooms as well as a common room made the living situation much more relaxed. Finally, my junior year I made it to the top of the food chain here at Northern. I was living in an

apartment!

Available apartment layouts at Ohio Northern.

The apartments on campus are nothing overly spectacular. They consist of a living room that sits right off of a galley style kitchen, two bathrooms (for a four bedroom apartment) on either side of the kitchen and four bedrooms about the size of the dorms we once lived in freshman year. The university also provides all of the standard furniture such as a couch, arm chair, dresser, desk and bed frame for the students living in the apartments to use. It wasn’t the Hilton by any means, but it is the closest that I have come to adult living. Living in an apartment setting teaches you a lot about living on your own. For example, you have a kitchen in your living space now. While being able to cook your own meals (or learn to cook for yourself) is great, it also means that you must learn to clean and maintain a kitchen. There will be a lot of hard learned lessons such as when is too long to not take out the trash, dirty dishes accumulate fast and if you don’t clean your oven it will probably be setting off your smoke detectors. The learning curve doesn’t just stop there. Living in a campus apartment also teaches you the scale of upkeep associated with living in a space with three other people. Rooms will get dirty as your schedules get hectic, but all in all it is a rewarding experience if you get to do it with the right people. Plus, living in an apartment is a good stepping stone towards living in your own place. Learning to cook, clean, organize, decorate and sometimes sleep in the same place is pretty much a run at the basics of adult living. You may not be paying taxes, mowing the lawn, fixing leaking pipes or hanging up Christmas lights outside but you still have an entire space to keep up and customize to your own (and your roommates’) liking. It’s most of the responsibility of living in the real world, just without having to pay for your utilities. I would strongly recommend apartment living for any college student before they graduate. That way it’s a little less of a shock when you start moving into your first post-graduation home.