4: New Digs
If you’re going to be a grad student I recommend you find the cheapest housing possible that meets your minimum standard of living and if forced to choose between the two criteria, go with the former. It might not seem like it at the outset of your journey but that extra fifty dollars a month will go a long way in coffee and cheap alcohol, something you’ll undoubtedly need in ample supply. That’s not to say that everyone who attends grad school is an alcoholic, far from it, but rather that you would do well to pick your vices and hold them dear to you, they may be one of the few things that gets you through.
For me, cheap housing was renting a “studio” room, sight unseen, in a unit that shared common amenities with three other people, none of which I had ever met before nor was I given any personal contact information for them ahead of time. In my room I would have my own bathroom, minifridge and kitchen sink. The unique and one of the more attractive features of this particular apartment was that it required no security deposit to rent. All you had to pay down was a one time $200 fee. Great. Wonderful. The online floor plan looked solid so I signed on the dotted line. This policy and its lack of resident accountability would have its inherent drawbacks as I would soon find out.
Sunday morning, now three of us instead of the planned two, we set out as soon as the leasing office was supposed to open at 10 o’clock. While always strictly adhered to during move-in weeks, the posted hours for the front office were more of a suggestion, as opposed to hard and fast rule during the rest of the year, as I would come to find out later. I stepped into the clean, bright, well-furnished office and with no trouble at all was given an envelope containing my apartment key and my room key, and I was handed a welcome folder with the wifi password written on a sticky note stuck to one of the inner flaps. The mail key, I was told, would be “somewhere” on the premises.
Keys collected, we made the quick drive one complex over to my new apartment. Part of a shoehorn of about sixty units, the place wasn’t hard to find and parking was ample. We backed our SUVs up in front of the door and prepared to unload two cars worth of stuff into a space that would hold two years of my life. Would that I could get those back.
The door to the apartment opened to a narrow hallway on the left and a set of stairs leading to a second floor to my immediate right. The floor was a cheap brown laminate designed to look like wood, the ceilings dusty and needlessly tall. The light switch to my left kicked on an almost fluorescent overhead light which cast the space in a hue that made everything look plastic. A quick check of two long closets to my left revealed the washer and dryer. A wet load of clothes which smelled of mold sat in the washer (later revealed to have been left behind by the previous tenants).
Straight ahead down the hallway was room A. My room was room B, presumably located somewhere further within the apartment on the first floor. I followed the hallway past a bend to the left and entered the kitchen and common area. A few things were notable about the kitchen: there was a row of dead bugs along the sill of the two large windows that lined one wall of the room, along another wall sat a large blue couch behind which sat our blinking wifi router, and next to the double sink sat a foot high stack of dusty, transparent, glass dishes, next to which sat a busted up brown plastic tray full of mismatched and ancient looking silverware. To the immediate right of the fridge, which was tucked in the right corner of the kitchen, was the door to my room. There was no trash can.
My room itself was unremarkable. Though the doors were more flimsy than I would have liked, the space was plain and noticeably more clean than the kitchen. The fridge was clean and the sink worked. The mottled beige walls were bare with the occasional pockmark and all of the lights were in working order.
The rest of the day went about as you would expect: the lugging and assembling of a new bed and reading chair, the arranging of my work desk and computer, and finding temporary organization for all of the clothes and smaller things I would need for the foreseeable future. Noticeably absent, however, was any sign of my roommates (I wouldn’t meet one for almost a week).
With a late night, bittersweet parting from my parents everything seemed set. Two years that place had to last me. Yet my attention was focused wholly on making it through the next two weeks, something that would prove more difficult and interesting than I could have expected.
