The 5 Worst Parts About Living In College Dorms

By Francine Fluetsch on March 22, 2016

You just got accepted into your college of choice. You couldn’t be more excited! You schedule a tour of the place, and the tour guide is so friendly, bustling you all around and giving you a history lesson of the school.

You gawk at all of the buildings you will soon get to utilize for your studies. The tour comes to a close by showing you a sample of what a dorm room looks like. The room they show you is spacious and clean, with a wonderful view. You stare around in excitement, picturing how you would decorate this space.

image via gizmodo.com

A few months later, it’s time to move in! You were advised not to bring too much stuff, but you remember from the room you were shown that the beds have room underneath them and you will have a spacious closet, so you bring everything that you will need.

You are handed your keys at check-in, and bound up the steps to your new home. You slide the key into the lock, twist it, and swing the door open. Your eyes sweep the room in shock.

You stare down at the piece of paper you were given, and realize that they stuck you into a small triple room at the last second. These bunk beds don’t have any room under them, and the “closets” are so small, you wonder if you can even fit half of your clothes in it, and you thought you didn’t even have that many.

This, my friend, is just the beginning of why dorms are the absolute worst!

No personal space.

Every year, the universities are trying to cram more and more students into each room so they are able to accept more incoming freshman, resulting in absolutely no personal space. Unless you get a single, you are going to have to get acquainted with your roommate(s) real quick.

Though your R.A. will make you sign a roommate contract at the beginning, no one ends up following it, so you will have to learn to speak up, or tolerate slight annoyances to keep the peace in your room.

What’s annoying is that some students stay up really late, while others need to go to bed early for 8 a.m.’s, and since you can’t really go sleep anywhere else, you have to hope that your roommates respect your sleeping time (which they probably won’t).

Everyone’s stuff will be everywhere, random people will be coming in and out of the room, and an inspection could happen at any second. It doesn’t even really feel like “your room,” it feels more like a public space that you just happen to be forced to sleep in.

The bathrooms make you want to barf.

You don’t realize how messy people are until you have to start sharing a bathroom with a whole floor of students. The toilets get clogged all the time, the smell of vomit is always in the air after a hard night of partying, and toilet paper runs out like no other. Some students pour their ramen and other food down the sink, even though there are signs that specifically tell them not to, resulting in nasty looking residue remaining in the sink, which is such a delight to stare at as you are brushing your teeth.

The dorm showers don’t even make you feel clean. The water pressure is dismal, and wearing shower shoes is not something that you ever get used to. Also, no one ever picks up their hair, so hair monsters start to grow and clog up the drains, giving you something wonderful to look at as you try to shower. If you get stuck in the dorms that only have shower curtains instead of doors, be aware of peeping toms.

No kitchen.

The dorms aren’t equipped with kitchens, meaning that you have to get breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the dining hall. This doesn’t seem bad at first. Most of them are buffet style and have a good amount of options. But after eating that food all day every day, you really start to get sick of it.

Sure, you can have a microwave and a mini fridge in your room, but then your roommates will eat all of your food, will heat something in the microwave that explodes and won’t clean it, and it limits what you can make. Plus, you are paying for your meal plan, so you feel obligated to use it.

Rules in all the wrong places.

There are certain R.A.s that will just have it out for you. Some nights, people will be out in the hallway until 2 a.m., laughing and playing their guitars, and no R.A. will be around to stop them. Then, when it’s a Friday night, you and some friends are laughing in your dorm room, and you get a knock on the door from a cranky R.A. telling you to keep it down.

Quiet hours are a joke and the people who are consistently loud never get caught. You can get written up for basically anything, so if you don’t have a chill R.A, beware.

greatschools.org

You can’t get any studying done.

Don’t even try to study in your room because it just isn’t going to happen. Even if your roommates are out, one of your hall mates is bound to burst into your room any second. Students are all about having fun their first year, and will try and coerce everyone around them to stop with the studying and have fun as well. If you really want to get studying done, you are going to have to go to the library or another quiet space.

These are just a few reasons why the dorms suck, but they are a right of passage, so once you survive them, you’ll have great stories to tell of all your crazy experiences!

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