November 28, 2012, by Shane
Where will you live?
Dear Readers,
First of all I’d like to apologise for the delayed posting of this blog. We’ve entered the second half of November and with it came an avalanche of deadlines. I beat my own record of most-amount-of-time-spent-in-the-library’ on Sunday, by a new personal best of thirteen hours (not really something to be proud of – yet sometimes a student necessity).
So this week I thought I’d talk to you about houses, or rather, any accommodation for next year. Its only November yet a lot of my friends seem to be already stressing about houses for next year. Fortunately, I am embarking on a year abroad next year (to either: Uni of Illinois, Connecticut, Arizona, SUNY Binghamton or SUNY Albany, for those of you who read my ‘Me, myself and I’ post) and therefore I am luckily left out of the stress of house … everything. However, I did go through it last year, so I sympathise.
Guess the road
Firstly, options for accommodation are:
- Go back into halls (Uni Park Halls, Jubilee Campus Halls, Sutton Bonington Hall)
- Move into self-catered accommodation (Raleigh Park, Broadgate, St Peters Court)
- Student Houses in Beeston – a lot closer to campus
- Student houses in Lenton – where majority of Non-first years move to.
- Albion House, Cloister House, Cotton Hill, Manor Village, River side and Opal 1 Nottingham
Some of the options differ according to whether they are strictly PostGrads, strictly UnderGrads or a mixture of both.
The University website has all the info about the accommodation options you could need:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/accommodation/accommodationoptions/accommodationoptions.aspx
For those of you who are going to be organising a house for next year, a few tips I’d suggest are:
Don’t Panic – easier said than done I know, yet rumours that all the good houses have been snapped up before Christmas spread like wildfire causing unnecessary stress. My friends and I did not look for houses until after our January exams last year; we found our dream house and signed it in February.
Take your time choosing housemates – particularly if you are a first year. You’ve most likely only known your new friends for two or three months and you may meet other people in your second term you would prefer to live with. Try not to rush.
Honesty is the best policy – I find when discussing things like living together, if you are not honest you may end up rather unhappy with your living situation for next year. A lot of people will avoid discussing it with their ‘obvious choice’ for potential housemates because they don’t want it to be awkward. Talking to outside parties can be useful for perspective, but at the end of the day it’s probably your immediate group of friends who you need to discuss houses with.
Approach with an open mind – when someone says they don’t want to live with you it can seem like rejection, yet there may be a number of reasons for their decision. They may be looking at a different price bracket to you, they may want to live with course friends for studying purposes, there may not be any certain house sizes left (e.g. A 7 person house – hard to find) or they may just think you are extremely messy – it doesn’t mean they still don’t want to be friends.
When my friends and I were discussing houses last year we had a group of thirteen which we needed to split into two houses. It was a little awkward and not everyone was immediately happy, but after a couple of weeks everyone had forgotten about it and were happy with their house choices 🙂
Good luck if you’re house-hunting sometime soon!
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