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It's that ever so fun time of year when a new crop of students is entering college. I remember that panicked excited anxiety that comes with getting ready for a new environment.
Specifically, looking around my room and going, "How the hell is this all going to fit into one car?"
But fear not, my little freshman. For here I am, the all-knowledgeable sophomore, prepared to give help you through your trying time.
For Part 1 of this series (Appliances) click here.
For Part 2 of this series (Clothes) click here.
Room Junk:
- Shelving - This could be a hutch above your desk or stand-alone cubes/shelves/bookcase. But get something - piling books on the floor gets cumbersome after a while.
- Lighting - Personally, I hate fluorescent lights and want to punch someone whenever I have to sit under them for very long. This made auxilary lighting in the dorm room a must have. Desk lights are extremely useful, and allow you to work late into the night Facebook easier when your roommate is sleeping. Also, rope lights and Christmas lights can provide useful light and make your room look awesome.
- Folding Chair - Very nice if you want to invite more than just your roommate into your room. If you get a camp chair, you can easily store it and not take up 50% of your floor space with it.
- Surge Protector/Power strip - Likely you won't have a lot of outlets in your room. And you don't want to lose all your notes halfway through the semester.
- Duct tape - You'll never know when you need it.
Linens & Things:
- Bedding - Sheets, Comforter, Blankies, Pillows, all that jazz. Try and bring more than one set so your lazy bum can take them off and not have to wash them right away.
- Towels - Again, more than one set. This way you'll also actually fill up a load of wash and not waste your quarters washing three towels.
- Bathrobe - You may not need this depending on your comfort and modest levels, but it can be nice when the weather's cold.
- Shower Shoes - You really don't want to touch that floor with your bare feet. Trust me.
- Shower Caddy - You also don't want to be dropping all of your soaps and stuff down the hall while you're wearing a towel.
- Toiletries - Do I really have to spell this out for you?
- Carpet - You don't want to be stepping on a cold tile floor in the morning.
- Silverware/Plates/Cups - You don't want to be eating off that floor, either.
- Laundry stuff - Quarters, Soap, Hamper, whatever
- Duct tape - Necessary for life.
Miscellaneous
- Cleaning supplies - I suggest something like Clorox wipes. Easy to handle, and cleans up a lot.
- Band-aids - I don't think the school will appreciate you bleeding all over the place.
- Hand sanitizer - Especially good for you germaphobes out there.
- Marker board - It's like Twitter for your hallway.
- External hard drive - Not just for computer nerds, but an excellent idea if you want to make sure your notes are safe.
It's that ever so fun time of year when a new crop of students is entering college. I remember that panicked excited anxiety that comes with getting ready for a new environment.
Specifically, looking around my room and going, "How the hell is this all going to fit into one car?"
But fear not, my little freshman. For here I am, the all-knowledgeable sophomore, prepared to give help you through your trying time.
For Part 1 of this series (Appliances), click here.
Clothes:
I'm going to assume you're a relatively smart individual and that you already know that you can't live months at a time on one pair of underwear. Therefore, I'm not going to mention every single item of clothing that you ought to pack, but instead highlight the special items.
- Coats/Jackets - This is IMPERATIVE if you are going to a college in a cold-weather locale. One of the best investments of the past year was a heavy-duty down jacket that was wonderfully warm in the snowy, gale-force winds that was normal at my school. But even if you're in a warmer locale, a windbreaker or rain jacket is probably a good idea.
- Rain boots - This is more of a girls-only type item, but it is necessarily for rainy days when you have to walk across puddled soggy campus sidewalks. Even if you think they are the ugliest things in the world, you won't when you have to walk half a mile in half an inch of water. Not to mention, pretty much every other girl has them on campus, so you won't feel out of place wearing neon rainbow colors.
- Snow boots - Again, a cold weather item, but it's really nice to have traction when the staircases aren't shoveled yet. Also, it is not fun to have your feet soaking wet in 35 degree weather.
- Interview clothes - Yes, I know, entering the real world is probably the last thing you want to think about when you begin college. But if a job fair or other opportunity comes up, you want to be dressed to impress. Heck, you might even need to give a presentation in your class that requires business attire. It's a lot better to pack what you've already got then to have to take the bus to the mall the night before.
- Bathing suit - You never know when you might take a road trip to a lake/pool/beach. Plus, tanning in the quad is really lame without a bikini top.
- Duct tape - I dunno, you could create your own clothing or something.
LEAVE AT HOME:
- Clothes you don't wear now - Seriously, if you haven't worn that soccer camp t-shirt in the last four years of high school, what makes you think you'll wear it when you're in college?
For Part 3 of this series, click here.
It's that ever so fun time of year when a new crop of students is entering college. I remember that panicked excited anxiety that comes with getting ready for a new environment.
Specifically, looking around my room and going, "How the hell is this all going to fit into one car?"
But fear not, my little freshman. For here I am, the all-knowledgeable sophomore, prepared to give help you through your trying time.
First off, all colleges are different. Likely, even the dorms between colleges are different, so try and get familiar with the one you have been placed in. I, for example, have been blessed with an abnormal amount of cabinet space in my dorm room, enabling storage of many items that would otherwise have to be piled on top of each other in the center of the floor. The tradeoff for this fortuitous closet space is that my room is an odd-shaped skinny rectangle in which you can't loft both beds. Keep these quirks of your room in mind.
So, let's examine what you will need, starting with the big stuff.
Appliances
- Fridge - One with a freezer is nice so you don't have to run to the opposite side of the building for ice when your knuckle swells to the size of a ping pong ball after slamming it into the wall. (No, no, I don't speak from experience at all on this one).
- TV - You don't necessarily need a TV, but it's a good thing if you want to watch your football team's away games in a place that's not the dorm lounge with obnoxious people shooting NERF darts at each other. You also don't need an uber-special flat panel. My 9" free CRT TV worked perfectly fine and allows space for more important things.
- Laptop - Remember to bring all your CDs and manuals and junk that came with the computer. Extremely useful if you're a moron who doesn't use firewall and gets a virus that makes you need to reformat your computer, or a non-moron who wants to upgrade your OS in the middle of the semester. (Guess which one I am! - Hint: it's the non-moron).
- Microwave - If you're not blessed with the best dining halls in the history of mankind like I am, you will likely get hungry. Also, they are good for making impromptu caramel apples.
- Fan - I live in a dorm where the temperature never went below 75 degrees. In the winter. Fans are necessary if you don't have air conditioning - I knew people who had stocked their room with five separate fans and still felt their room was hot. Of course, they might have been pansies, but that's another story entirely.
- Chargers - Yeah, I don't think your cell phone will last more than a week without this.
- Alarm clock - Waking up and going to class is generally necessary for not getting on academic probation.
- Duct tape - A handy sort of thing to have.
LEAVE AT HOME:
- Vacuum - Now this likely sounds interesting and probably implies that I have no hygiene at all. Nevertheless, I have yet to find a dorm vacuum that functions as a proper vacuum. Most vacuums in dorms are mini versions that refuse to pick up anything but the slightest crumb (and even then, they mostly fail). In other words, you'll likely have the same amount of hair on your carpet at the end of the year if you bring one versus if you leave it at home. Unless you bring a full-sized, mega-power vacuum, and then, good luck fitting it some place in your room.
For part 2 of this series (Clothes) click here.
I have many problems with Facebook. Too many, in fact, to be enumerated in such a short space. (Considering the space I have to write is infinite, I believe that says quite a bit about my feelings for the site).
But Facebook presents a special issue for the more anti-social of its users. That is, of course, the "friend" tool. If you're like me, you don't like people. When strangers strike up a conversation, your first reaction is the famed "deer in headlights" look followed by a mumbled response and a frantic glance for the exits. This makes riding in elevators quite difficult.
So, as you can imagine, becoming someone's "friend" is more than just clicking an accept button. It's as if I'm letting you into all aspects of my life. My flair, artistic self-portraits, and statues quoting obscure song lyrics are important to me - I can't just let anyone see them!
But denying friend requests is just as tricky as accepting them. There seems to be a number of people who you are pressured to accept despite actually not liking them at all. I'm thinking of people who you see regularly, such as classmates or colleagues, or people who will bug you if you're not their friend, such as family members or those people who hang out with mutual friends and you try to like them so as to not ruin the group dynamic but you actually hate their guts.
It's when people like these friend request me that I'm sent into a slight panic attack. How do I not offend them but still manage to reject their friendship? Luckily, I've developed some techniques for this tough situation.
1) Don't respond for as long as possible. Perhaps they'll forget that they friended you and you can delete their request without fear several weeks later. Also, it helps if you have several people kept waiting in this friend purgatory, because if asked why you didn't accept you can say that they "got lost in the queue".
2) Check their friends list. If the number exceeds 1,000, just ignore them. They won't miss your presence. For those that exceed 500 another trick is to friend them for a week then remove them. The likelihood that they'll see you're missing is slim.
3) Friend them. Then hide them from your news feed. This works for people who are obnoxious to friend because they post updates about their bowel movements every hour or spend their waking hours on Farmville. Not an option if you're paranoid about this person stalking you.
4) Evaluate their stalkability. If they're interesting and you like to snicker at their stupid party pictures, friend them. Or if you think they're a poison to your group of friends and you want to know their sinister plans, friend them. As I always say, Facebook is for me to stalk you, not for you to stalk me. And how will you know what they're up to if you're not Facebook friends with them?
If all of these techniques fail, you still have two options open to you. Suck it up, look them in the (figurative) eye and ignore them, or determine that you really don't have anything useful on Facebook anyway and friend them.
(For the record, at the time of posting I have 67 friends on Facebook. I told you, I don't like people).
