Student Rooms: Expectations vs Reality!

When booking your student room and starting your new aca`demic year or starting your whole university life experience, you usually have some expectations on how your life as an independent student studying abroad will look like, but the reality, as it turns out, is slightly different. Whether these expectations are ours, our parents’ or friends’, we still fall under the myth of having to control everything in our lives as students. We’re here to assure you that we’ve all been there, every student who moves to join university whether in an on-campus or off-campus student accommodation at least had experienced one the things listed below.

I’ll clean my room every week

We all think that we’ll be residing in amazing apartments for college students and cleaning will be the easiest thing to do when we live by ourselves since there will be no one else to clean after or to mess up our stuff. The reality hits when you realize that you leave everything as is because you still know where everything is. So why go through the hassle of cleaning then? To avoid procrastinating more than you should, try using this golden rule of ours: anything that takes less than 10 minutes do it now.

I’ll pre-cook my meals every week

We get all excited about cooking and preparing our meals a week ahead. But that’s not as easy as it seems, it needs shopping on the weekend, and preparing the ingredients beforehand, whether they’re vegetables, protein, or fruits. If you’re one of the students who love to pre-cook their meals, it might be a good idea to book a self-contained studio or an en-suite where you have a private fridge/freezer. If this option is unavailable, make sure you talk to your flatmates about organizing the fridge’s shelves with your names on it so your food won’t get mixed with theirs. And of course, there will be times when you’ll have to grab-and-go your food to catch up with the bustling student life of yours, so don’t worry, we’ve all been there.

I’ll rock it with laundry

We all think that laundry is easy to handle until it’s our to-do task. It might be a good idea to separate your clothes throughout the week, meaning when you’re storing your unclean clothes, group dark colours together since they’ll be washed separately and have the light coloured clothes in a different laundry bag. So when it’s laundry day, you won’t struggle with grouping them. Get your own laundry basket as your room will not come with one. It’s better to buy it when you arrive at your student accommodation in the city you’re going to. If you need to know where to find these easily, ask your accommodation mates. 

I’ll have the best roommate/flatmate

We all strive to make new friends and meet new people, but regardless of the fact that other students might not be at ease when it comes to socializing, some flatmates/roommates are not really that easy to deal/live with. You have to understand that we all come with different backgrounds and cultures, which certainly affects what we think of as friendly and what we think of as not. Feel free to read our 6 Types of Roommates You’ll Meet in College blog post to learn more.