Tips On Preparing Your Dorm Room Stuff & Meeting Your Dorm Mate
By S. Michael Windsor
When first arriving at college and first walking into the barren dorm room, new students may realize that they still have a lot of shopping to do in order to decorate those blank walls and actually DO something with the place. Sometimes this task may even take a lot of the year and then by the end…it’s time to take everything down. Better preparation is the key.
The first step in getting that dorm room in a livable fashion is to contact your roommate if you haven’t already and take a little time to get to know them and to find out what exactly they like on their walls. It is also a good idea at this time to get the dimensions of the room so you can properly plan out what to bring. This information may be online, but if not, then just contact your college or university and they will be glad to help in most cases.
Once you contact your roommate, you will both have to decide on a color scheme and theme for the room. There is nothing worse living with a roommate than a really bad decorator you are afraid to say anything to the entire year because you know it may very well hurt their feelings. Get things out in the open about what you want the dorm room to look like early on in order to help alleviate these disagreements. Remember, you will be living in very close quarters for an entire school year.
Next, find out what the college dorms do not allow in the dorm rooms. This is normally limited to candles or other fire-breathing items as well as such things as halogen lamps which COULD start a fire if something is laid on top of it. The limitations may seem a bit extreme but it is only for the safety and well being of ALL the students living there.
Once you have figured out what you both want and what the limitations at the dorm are, collect the items that you can use among both or you as well as just yourself and compile a list of items that are still going to be needed. It would be a good time to buy these items ANYTIME before the school year begins as there will be a lot of things going on at the university that you may gave to miss out on just to get your dorm room set up and shopping for stuff like extension cords.
Through decorating the dorm room together, this helps you and your new roommate actually start talking and helps alleviate those anxieties of living with a complete stranger in a small dorm room. Sometimes friends will request each other and become roommates, not bad. But in most cases, students living in the dorms are given a random roommate and will have to learn to live with the person whether they talk first or not. So why not give it a try and get that dorm decorated and set up the way that BOTH of you want it to be. And if they are a very passive person who says they don’t care what it looks like, try to get SOMETHING out of them as they will ultimately have to live with it too in the long run.
S. Michael Windsor is currently publisher and a writer for BackToSchoolNetwork.com. The BSN Online Back To School Guide is a premier college back-to-school information platform that provides individuals with a quality in-depth look at these topics as well as the associated products, services and information available today. Visit us today at http://www.BackToSchoolNetwork.com and get your free subscription our member services.
