12 Things Most Students in Accommodation will Understand

As this is a Christian blog, I haven’t included any alcohol or drug related things. I imagine there would be 12 more things to write about if I had included them! So if you were a student in accommodation, how many of these things can you identify with?

Your weight changes

AKA Freshman Fifteen. When most students who are living away from home arrive on campus, it’s the first time they’ve lived on their own. So going food shopping without Mum and/or Dad in tow means buying whatever you want. For a lot of people, this means gaining weight, sometimes a lot. However, some people end up losing a lot of weight, as a result of not enough money for decent meals, laziness or an inability to cook.

Your accent changes

You leave for university with a Brummie accent. By Christmas, you have an accent that’s a mix of Scottish, scouse and slightly southern.

Your body clock changes

You can crawl out of bed to make a 9 am lecture, but on your days off, you end up sleeping from 9 am to 5 pm. You never have to worry about putting up with daytime TV, because you sleep through it!

Naps

You’ve no idea why you hated naps as a child. Right now, they’re the best thing since sliced bread. In fact, you might just go for one now.

Going home to decent food/shower/washing machine

Home means a clean washing machine! A warm shower that has a bit of power! And roast dinners that are cooked for you! What could be better?!

Dreading certain nights because of your flatmates

You have a 9 am lecture on a Friday but Thursday night is half price drinks at the student club. You want a good night’s sleep but your drunken flatmate(s) always stumbles noisily into the flat at stupid o’clock and keeps everyone else awake for hours. Righteous anger is permitted here.

The flatmate(s) that never does the dishes

Normally they show themselves pretty quickly. You always know which is their crockery and cutlery, because it’s got hardened pasta and mouldy cheese sauce stuck to it. They always use your kitchenware and never clean it, despite many requests, leaving you to have to clean it. I ended up locking certain things in my room.

Vanishing food

A lot of food in student flats has an uncanny ability to disappear, even if labelled something along the lines of, “Katy’s food, please don’t touch!” I had a flatmate who always nicked my teabags, so one day when I was fed up of it, I switched my teabags to camomile. The flatmate made her tea as usual (boiling water, milk, sugar), then took a sip. I had the delight of seeing her repulsed face as she drank it. She never pinched them again.

Ownerless food

There’s also always food in the fridge that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone. There’s no label on it, everyone’s been asked and all claimed it’s not theirs. But no one wants to chuck it out as, having a look at it, it appears to have belonged to someone three years ago and everyone’s too squeamish to touch it.

That one flat…

There’s always one flat that has half a million empty alcohol bottles on display. There’s another flat that has a flag of a different country in the window (at my university, there was a Welsh flag hanging out of someone’s window, the university was in England. And no, it wasn’t me!) And there’s always that one flat that seems to have noisy parties every night, leaving you to wonder how they’re still at university.

The idiotic flat downstairs that constantly sets fire alarm off

Another ‘one flat’. You’ve just made your dinner and have settled down with a DVD on when the fire alarm goes off. Usually it’s due to the flat next door or directly underneath you. You have to traipse outside into the drizzly cold while the firefighters bravely battle against burnt toast or (a real incident in my uni days) some idiot has had the oven on really hot, then put the oven glove over the oven door AND SHUT IT WITH HALF THE OVEN GLOVE INSIDE!

Cleaning

It’s the final day in the flat before handing back the keys and you want your deposit returned. Your contract states your room must be as it was when you arrived. So the rubber gloves come out, polish is bought and the vacuum is on. You give your room a really good clean and suddenly realise it’s the first time you’ve cleaned it since you arrived. Whoops.