Friday, October 8

Off Campus Living 101

The first publishing of my new column in The Western Carolinian. Welcome to "Off Campus Living 101!"

"Good day, everyone, and welcome to Apartment Living 101, a residential choice class requirement. Your fellow classmates are in the other residential choice class, Dorm Living 102. This is not a class you can add/drop or withdraw from after fifth week grades. You either succeed or you fail. Also, this is a two-semester course. You must attend both semester courses to pass.
In this course, you will learn how function as an independent adult in four major areas: interaction with roommates and land lords, cooking and housekeeping, bill payments, and maintaining good grades in an off campus environment. By the end of the semester, you should be able to demonstrate cool headedness in dealing with a partying neighbor and healthy cooking skills that do not include order-in pizza or Ramen noodles. You should also be able to get your rent check in without a verbal reminder from your roommates and maintain a parent-approved GPA. You will need to rent or buy the following books from the campus bookstore for the semester’s reading assignments:
1.      Fifty Meals on Fifty Dollars a Month
2.      How to Juggle… a Job, Classes, Housework, and Free Time
3.      When the Good Neighbors Go Bad
4.      Channel Surfing: an in-depth look at how to share the TV among two or more people with pull-out TV remote diagram
5.      They Will Never be Cheery: dealing with the landlord
6.      60 Ways to get Evicted
You may also want to bring a copy of your lease as different establishments have different regulations.
If you have a pet, I suggest signing up for Apartment Living 101.02 for a deeper look into how to approach your landlord on the subject, how to afford it, and how to convince your roommates it is a good idea.
For the final exam, I will be conducting thorough and surprise searches of your apartments at the end of the semester. Cleanliness and healthy food choices are the main areas I will be concentrating on. I will also be conducting interviews with your roommates, neighbors, and landlord to determine how well you have applied what we learned this year.
 This will be a great experience, and I cannot wait to see how each one of you will handle this major adjustment! If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or particularly funny stories, please contact me by email or visit me during my office hours at the Old Student Union Building.
You are dismissed! Please have your books, lease, and a one-page paper of why I moved off campus by the next class."

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