I hate the people I live with, what should I do?
Halls are a pretty artificial environment. Thousands of young people move away from home, are randomly assigned poky rooms, a couple of showers and a communal kitchen and are left to get on with it. It’s like Shipwrecked without the desert island. Or the sunshine. Or the camera crews. To be honest it’s not really like Shipwrecked. But you get my point: it’s weird.
Whether or not you have anything in common with your housemates is something of a lottery. Some people love their first year ‘housies’, stay living with them throughout university and end up as friends for life, sleeping together in a big happy dormitory like The Waltons until their mid-forties (“goodnight John boy!”).
By contrast some people despise their housemates from the start, spend their entire year plotting elaborate schemes to avoid using the kitchen and lock themselves in their room, passing the time by building forts out of empty cans of Tizer and living off tepid spam fritters poached in the sinks of their ensuite.
Let’s be honest though, most people will find themselves somewhere between these two extremes. Just like every other institution you’ve been a part of during your fledgling life, from school to Brownie Camp to Junior Clarinet Orchestra, at university you will meet some people you love, some you hate and many that you’re simply indifferent to. Close proximity means that your relationships with your housemates will likely move at superhuman speed. By week two of freshers’ I felt like I’d known my housemates forever.
Housemate relationships often resemble sibling bonds- they can infuriate you, but because they end up knowing you better than anyone else they can also be your closest friends. However, unlike siblings you can’t rely on unconditional love so you have to make an effort. Cooking the occasional meal together, leaving your door open, welcoming people into your room and spending time in the kitchen can all help turn the stranger you live with into something resembling a friend (albeit a friend that never leaves.)
Hopefully, even if you don’t necessarily have that much in common with your housemates you can manage a cordial relationship. But what if it all goes wrong? What if you never actually meet half your housemates because they’ve decided to lock themselves in their rooms and play on Bejewelled for the year? What if the quiet and apparently harmless blonde who lives next door to you is actually an outspoken racist who fills the kitchen with post-it notes covered in Enoch Powell quotes? What if, like one friend, you discover that the person you live with has decided to hold your sandwich toaster for ransom because he mistakenly believes you have been hiding his shoes?
If all else goes wrong you have a right to request that the University move you to different halls so you can meet some more well-balanced individuals. Or you can focus on joining societies, chatting to people in your seminars and making friends outside of halls.
Many people don’t end up living with their halls housemates in second year, simply because they’ve managed to find a group of friends with whom they’ve got much more in common outside of the University Accommodation Friendship Lottery. And at least if you have housemates from hell you’ll have some great stories when you get back home.