Life after RPS

There are two types of students at IU: those who live on campus, and those who don’t.

Glassy-eyed freshmen will just now be entering the drunk bliss of Welcome Week. By the end of the first week of school, they will wake up to the sober reality of living for a year with a mix of randos and RAs that will either barely do their job, take their job too seriously or potentially ruin their lives.

Meanwhile the student who decided to join the exodus of upperclassmen living off campus will be living on their own for the first time. That’s right: no more meal points, no more people paid to clean the bathrooms, and most importantly, no more immediate supervision.  But all that freedom comes at a cost — monthly rent, landlords and much more personal responsibility.

For all the heat that Residential Programs and Services often gets, its ultimate goal is still to aid first-year students in successfully transitioning to college. They must therefore be accountable to students and, by extension, are much more likely to bend to a parent’s angry phone call.  

Landlords are completely different beasts.

After some hasty and really misguided decision-making, I ended up living at Smallwood Plaza this past school year. Going in, I knew that student housing in Bloomington is a business, and a big one at that. However, I wasn’t prepared for the frigid, money-hungry and contemptuous management willing to do anything to choke out the largest amount of cash possible for the most trivial of things.

For many students living off campus for the first time, this type of scenario is a common one. So, take some words of wisdom from someone who escaped the love/hate bubble of the dorms. They could really come in handy, especially when it comes to bangers at your new place.

I’m no legal expert, but I can confidently say that you are ultimately responsible for what happens inside your house when you have friends/guests/strangers over. That can look anything like a noise complaint to yes, the under-21-year olds getting sick on the floor of your new apartment. If one of Bloomington’s Finest makes an unexpected house call it won’t matter to them why they got there, but rather who lives there and who’s going to be paying the citation at the courthouse next week.

In the (semi) real world of living off campus, actions and inactions can have many more implications than in the comfy bubble of the residence halls. Whereas you might’ve just had to pay a couple hundred bucks and been required to show up to a class at Eigenmann Hall for vomming outside your neighbor’s place, doing that when living in actual Bloomington might lead to public intox on your record and an awkward conversation with a potential future employer.

Yet, it’s not all doom and gloom when living off campus. It’s actually really great. I can’t possibly imagine having to live in a dorm again after doing so freshman year. But just like some people wouldn’t want to, some do. And just like there are terrible landlords, there are good ones.

This year I’m living off campus again and have been at my new place since June.

Since I moved in, I’ve become actual friends with the property manager of the multi-million dollar complex, and have yet to find a fault. How many people can say that? I don’t know.

But what I do know is that I couldn’t be happier with my decision.

-— edsalas@indiana.edu