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March 7, 2017
5 Hot Tips for Students Staying in Housing on a Break By Thomas Noriega Externship fall through? Parents don’t want you at home? Your elaborate plans to take a group of friends, drive cross-country, and discover America while simultaneously discovering yourselves get called off due to a peanut-related medical emergency? We’ve all been there, and we’ve all been stuck in South Campus with no company but the howling winds, existential dread and surprisingly accommodating dining staff for company. Here are five tips for putting the “chool” in “My every waking moment has become school. Even in repose, there is only school.”
1. Learn more about your fellow students. Just because everyone is gone doesn’t mean you can’t get to know them better! Skip the awkward random messaging phase and get straight to meaningful conversation by sneaking into their dorm room and checking out their stuff. As soon as they get back, you can get right into their good graces by casually mentioning how you, too, only read the first twenty pages of Infinite Jest.
2. Take your sweet goddamn time. Do you want to spend a straight hour showering, shitting, or slowly picking your way through the salad bar? Follow up question: is there anyone around to stop you?
3. Pick your own room. Why should you have to move to South? Maybe you live all the way in North and can’t stand to be away from your Orwellian dystopia-inspired living space. Maybe the glow of the sun setting over the Reg is the highlight of life in Max P. Maybe you live in South and just hate it. Whatever your situation, simply enter the room of your choosing before housing closes, secret yourself away in a closet/Shawshanked out hole in the wall, and as soon as the last employees leave the building, voila! Your perfect room is yours. Enjoy it, because they’ll be turning off the utilities soon.
4. Explore Chicago! Why worry so much about campus? You’re right next to the third-largest city in the USA! Spend your days walking among the shimmering skyscrapers, visiting the varied neighborhoods, strolling down Michigan Avenue, finally feeling like you’re a real citizen of Chi- wait, they deactivate the U-Passes? Well, you could try- oh, your bike is at home. And Uber’s expensive as fuck. Well, maybe you can finally spend a whole night sleeping in the Reg. That’s kinda cool.
5. Wait for break to be over. Honestly, who are we kidding? Even cramming for a midterm while writing an essay and feeling sleep deprivation slowly deprive you of any corporeal sensation with friends is better than living a healthy lifestyle with real sleep patterns in a giant 3D-printed collage of a dorm.
