Living on a college campus is a toss-up. The food is trash, the bathrooms perpetually smell like a mix of chemicals and diarrhea, and the average dorm is packed tighter than a white trash Mom’s backpack on a bi-annual trip to Disney World. With that being said, you’ll be too distracted by the freedom you now have to care that your future self or your parents are paying fifty grand for glorified prison living conditions. There ARE little things you can do that will make a big difference in how your years on campus will go. So to everyone like my brother who has just stepped foot on their new home for the next two years, take this for what it’s worth.
Librivox: Librivox is the Limewire of audiobooks. It’s an app where you can save anywhere from four to fifty dollars on Apple Audiobooks and stream them for free with an ad that plays every three chapters. Albeit this isn’t sexy advice- and you certainly aren’t going to get laid from listening to audiobooks, but it’s a big time saver. If you popped in your AirPods between each commute in your day, you could potentially get all your reading done for the week AND not have to Moneybagg Yo when he comes on Rap Caviar shuffle.
Buy An Air-Fryer: If you fed an Afghan refugee leftover pizza that you microwaved right now, even HE would tell you to get that soggy shit out of here. Air-Fryer’s are the fucking best. With a fifty-dollar purchase off Amazon, you can make the frozen section of any supermarket your bitch. You can even fucking grill on an Air-Fryer if you’re brave enough. I’m certain that air-fryers are frowned upon in freshman dorms, but I’ve seen kids trap a blogger’s annual salary in a semester out of a freshman dorm, so don’t be a pussy.
Hide Your Dab Pen: If I was to list the most important things to keep in a college dorm, it would go: John Belushi poster, PS5, Dab Pen. Every kid comes into college with a pen; it’s the most accessible way to get high before living off-campus; the only problem is that it’s the number one cause of strife between roommates. I’ve seen cold wars go down in rooms when one kid left and noticed his pen was one-tenth-of-an-inch used—my advice: hide it. If your roommate asks you, let them rip it every once in a while. And most importantly, don’t be that kid that goes door to door asking for pen rips; if you’re actively doing that, I promise people already don’t like you.
Ration Your Alcohol Violations: Ninety-nine percent of the people who live on a college campus are underage, which means they have an RA. Once in a blue moon, you’ll have an RA that gets it. He’ll Paul Revere for you when inspections are coming, turn a blind eye to your degeneracy, and possibly even become one of your friends. That’s the dream. The reality is a curly-haired graduate student from Cincinnati who has cat memes and pictures of AOC hanging on his door. For most colleges, three Alcohol violations can equate to suspension, so it’s essential to ration them with the homies. If your boy already has one, and he’s only had two beers since he’s been in your room, take this one for him. Ideally, your entire friend group can leave campus with one or two AVs and call it a day. No suspensions or no major student conduct meetings- just guys being dudes.
Find A Water Source: College is a lot like Africa. Between girls with giant tits, a surplus of the best drugs on the planet….I can’t even finish this one. But seriously, finding drinking water on most college campuses isn’t easy. This might be a hot take, but in retrospect, I would have taken an office cooler over a TV when I was living in the dorms. The number of times I’d wake up delirious at 5:30 in the morning and have to inhale lukewarm water mixed with an old batch of toothpaste from the sink was just way, way too many. I still need a goddamn trigger warning whenever I see Crest Scope.
