Posts Tagged ‘college dorm’
3 Unexpected Items You Will Need in College
For those of you doing your college shopping for the first time, you can probably recite your entirely list by heart at this point. Between college orientation, department store sales, web sites, and advice from upperclassmen, you know that a white board on your door is a welcoming sign, that bed risers will prevent you from feeling like your bed belongs to a five year old, and that a pair of flip flops are an absolute must for the shower if you care at all about your feet! But there’s always a few things during the semester that did not appear on your list that you will wish you had. Here are three of those unexpected items.
Toolbox
A toolbox may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you begin crafting your dorm room shopping list. After all, you won’t be doing any remodeling or installing work inside your dorm room, but you will be surprised how often you could actually use a screw driver, a wrench, and some nails. If you decide you want a different chair for your desk, or a bookshelf, you will want to have the tools to put it together. If a bolt comes loose in your futon, you will want the ability to tighten it up. You might have a nail sticking out in your dresser, and instead of waiting three days for maintenance, with your own hammer, you can quickly fix it yourself. Basic tool kits can be bought at any department store, and you can get them in all kinds of fun colors!
Sewing Kit
You have probably seen the sewing kit on your college dorm lists before and shrugged it off. When was the last time you sewed anything? When would you possibly need that? You might not even know how to sew! While you won’t be using a small sewing kit too often, it ends up being nice to have. You might be involved in a club that plans to personalize t-shirts for an event, and you want to sew something to it. You could rip your only pair of dress pants twenty minutes before a presentation in which appearance makes up 20% of your grade! With sewing kits only being a few dollars in the check out line, why not?
Craft Supplies
You probably wouldn’t think of buying fun scissors, stickers, markers, glue, crayons, tape, fabric paint, glitter, and other crafty things to college unless your major deals with children. Surprisingly, there are a lot of instances in which these tools come in handy. You will find yourself making posters for presentations, decorating t-shirts for club events, drawing pictures for group bonding games, wrapping birthday presents, and someday, painting graduation caps. With late summer being back-to-school season, you can easily stock up on all of these things for just a few bucks!
5 Friend-Making Items to Bring to Your Dorm Room
This summer, as you pack your boxes and bags full of DVDs, fluffy bathroom towels, and extra long twin sheets, consider taking items that are likely to spawn new friendships with others in your residence hall. While making new friends in college won’t be as hard as you think, it couldn’t hurt to have a couple of gadgets on hand to get the ball rolling. Not sure which of your possessions would work? Check out our list of these great friend-making items you can bring to your dorm!
Gaming Systems
As if you were going to leave that behind! Having a gaming system in your room may seem like an anti-social move, but with the number of people who play video games today, and with some of the best video games coming out every fall, you are likely to find many people who will want to talk about games, play multi-player games alongside you, and start floor-wide tournaments.
Outdoor Games
With the first weeks of college still feeling like summer, now is the time to bring your frisbees, soccer balls, and Kan Jam! It won’t be uncommon for you to walk outside by yourself with a ball, and an hour later, have entire teams playing kickball, all of whom you have just met! Inviting others to partake in outdoor activities is a quick way to learn a few names, and as the person who owns this equipment, you can expect to be who others go to when they’re looking for some fun on a Sunday afternoon.
A Movie Collection
If you have a wide DVD collection, a Netflix or Hulu subscription, or the latest episodes of your favorite TV shows downloaded from iTunes, you can expect to be pretty popular around the residence hall. By turning one night a week into a theatrical event, with everyone taking turns bringing the popcorn and the pizza, you will find yourself in the company of quite a few new friends.
Appealing Dorm Room Decor
Your room is far more likely to draw others in if there’s bamboo on the windowsill, neon lights aglow around your desk, and a comfy carpet on the floor, as opposed to a room with no personality at all. A really awesome looking room will cause people walking down the hall to stop and peek in. It will be the place where your friends want to hang out. Make your room as interesting and fun as you can, while still obeying all of your residence hall rules and regulations of course!
Toys
Another way to make your dorm room more enticing to others is if you have something for others to tinker with while they’re there. I mean, we’re all really kids at heart, right? Someone who had originally come by to get the notes for a class they missed could find themselves sticking around for an hour because they were playing with the magnetic poetry on your fridge! Litter your room with these kinds of fun, addictive toys!
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3 Keys to a Successful College Dorm Room
While your dorm room may be small, big things will happen there. This is where you’ll type the first sentence of your first novel. It’s where you’ll begin memorizing human bones and muscles on a road that will eventually lead to a medical degree. It’s where engineers, lawyers, and artists first sit down with a textbook and begin understanding the theories, concepts, and practices of their world. Your dorm room should reflect that! It should inspire you to explore. It should motivate you to get out of bed when it’s snowing. It should remind you of who you are and where you’ve come from. Check out these ways you can make your dorm room explode with greatness and color in a way that will make you proud to be a college student, as well as excited about life, even when it’s gray and raining!
Use Lots of Color
There will be a week it rains–every single day. You might have a month where you feel as if you haven’t seen the sun at all, and you never will again. Somewhere around the middle of the semester, you might feel like everyday is filled with chapters to read and papers to write with no end in sight. As your dorm room is likely various shades of black, white, and gray, prepare for those not-so-bright weeks by brightening up your living space with your favorite colors. Get blue magnets for your fridge, a bright pink rug, or yellow pillows. These fun items might be enough to improve your mood on that thundering Tuesday afternoon!
Have A Variety of Lighting Solutions
You may want to have numerous options for lighting your dorm room. Do you have a setting for when you’re up late finishing a project and your roommate is asleep? How about a setting for when it’s pitch black outside and you and your roommate want to stay up playing a game? What about a setting for when you’re in bed finishing up a chapter in a book, and don’t want to get up to turn off the light? Consider stand alone lamps, lamps with multiple settings, desk lamps, book lights, push lights, decorative lights, and any other type of light you can think of that will allow you to adjust lighting for any situation.
Give Yourself Motivation
Everyone has a reason for attending college and for choosing a particular major. Maybe you’re going to school to be a teacher because you had a teacher who changed your life. Maybe you’re a film major because Fight Club is your favorite movie, and you want to create art with that much complexity. Have something in your room that will remind you of why you’re here. When you’re in the middle of a twenty-page paper while your friends are all at a party, or when it’s the first warm week of the semester and you’d rather tan than study, you’ll need the motivation to keep you going!
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4 Ways to Choose your Freshman Roommate
If you’re like me, when one stress source closes, another window of stress opens. So, even though you are officially relieved from the anxiety that is begotten from the college search–assuming everyone reading this blog has been admitted to college and has decided where they’ll be heading–don’t get stressed out that you’re going to run out of things to stress out about. We have another stress factor for you: Your freshman roommate.
The freshman roommate can turn out to be a(n):
A. absolute nightmare
B. BFF
C. just a person you happen to share a tiny room with
Here are 4 ways to go about choosing your future freshman college roommate:
1. Blind
Rooming blind is for the adventurous. For those who yearn for the surprise and peril of the open sea! It’s also for anyone who is kind of apathetic about the whole thing.
Pro: You could be paired with someone who you wouldn’t meet otherwise and who could help expand your college world.
Con: You have no way of knowing what you’ll be getting in to.
2. A friend
Rooming with a friend is a risk, but not for risk-takers.
Pro: You’ll be living with someone you already know! Having a safety net could help you be more outgoing when making new friends.
Con: Moving from friends to college roommates is an underrated shift in the tectonic plates of friendship. You’ll suddenly be around each other 24/7. You could risk changing the friendship you have.
3. A friend of a friend
The friend of a friend roommate strategy is the perfect smoothie made from the blind roommate situation and friend roommate situation.
Pro: You have a friend in common, so you know a mutual friend thinks you’re both pretty rad and probably won’t steal things.
Con: If you both have a lot of the same mutual friends, your social circle might not expand the way you wanted it to in college.
4. Facebook or social networking site
For the person who wants to control the roommate issue as much as they can without going through friends.
Pro: You can handpick your college roommate by sifting through different options to find the person that you think you’d get along with while dwelling together.
Con: You might not get what you thought you signed up for.
Do you have any advice or thoughts on choosing a freshman college roommate? Leave a comment!
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I’m Going to College, Now What Should I Take with Me?
Besides snakes, the boogie man, spiders, and the occasional un-dead, packing is one of the most feared phenomenons known to man. How can an ordinary human effectively and efficiently decide on which selective assortment of belongings will have the privilege of moving from point A to point B? The mere thought of it could put any person in a tizzy.
When you’re packing for not just a little vacation but for a year of college, things can get pretty heated. There’s just no way you can take both your lava lamp and study lamp! You’ll only have room for one.
To help quell your fear, here’s a list of 7 things you should bring with you to your freshman dormitory:
1. Extra-long sheets and bedding
Definitely double-check this one, but most college dorms have extra-long mattresses. Some simple math brings me to the conclusion that if you have a longer mattress, you’ll need longer sheets. Also, you might want to bring a study pillow if you’re ever too tired to head out to the library.
2. The smallest kitchen you’ll hopefully ever use
There will be a point in your college career when leaving your 10′ X 15′ room is just not an option–think extreme weather or wee small hours of the morning. To prepare for instances like this, you’ll want a mini fridge and/or microwave. There’s no way you can pull an all-nighter without something delicious to nosh on.
3. Laundry bag/basket
The laundry bag/basket serves multiple important purposes including the obvious, to hold and transfer laundry from your dorm room to the laundry facility. The other utilization of the laundry bag/basket is for the quick fix before your parents show up for visitors’ weekend. If you don’t have time to really clean your room, just temporarily stick everything in there. Old college trick.
4. A tiny bit of nostalgia
Take a little morsel of what you had back home with you to college. A couple of pictures of the “Fab Five” or that guy trying way too hard to grow mustache that you took to prom is fine. Maybe throw in a couple pictures of mom and dad. But don’t go too far. College is about moving forward.
5. Sustenance
What’s your fuel? A protein bar? Some V8? Whatever non-perishable it is, buy it in bulk and keep it in a container under you bed. You’ll thank me later.
6. A lot of boring stuff
Bring all that stuff you don’t really have to purchase at school because you have an abundance of them at home i.e. hangers, coffee mugs, notebooks, pens, hula skirts (maybe I just grew up in a weird home)–all the lovely little things you take advantage of while living at home.
7. School supplies
This one kind of piggy backs on #6, but you can save some money by bringing school supplies you already have at home with you to college. Look through your house for extra things you might want, like pens, calculators, books etc. Also, definitely figure out what your computer situation is going to be. Will you purchase a laptop or desktop with a student deal? Or will you opt on using the school computer labs?
Do you have any packing tips? Comment and share!
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The 10 Best College Dorms in the Country
In most dorm rooms, there’s barely enough space to move between your bed and the door. The Huffington Post, though, has just posted the 10 best college dorms in the country. These are not your average college dorms. These are super dorms, complete with kitchens, copious amounts of square feet and common spaces fit for a king, or studying. Do you think these awesome college dorm rooms also come with an awesome college roommate who doesn’t steal your stuff?
Here are the 10 best college dorms in country:
1. La Salle University, St. Basil Court
2. Winona State University, Lucas
3. Villanova University, Farley Hall
4. Georgia State University, University Commons
5. Mississippi State University, Hurst Hall
6. Villanova University, Welsh Hall
7. James Madison University, Gifford Hall
8. The College of New Jersey, Eickhoff Hall
9. Kennesaw State University, University Village Suites
10. Saint Joseph’s University, Borgia Hall
Would you choose a college for a dorm?
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