Three strikes for on-campus housing, and I'm out

I’ve never had much luck with housing at Penn.

I lived in the Quadrangle freshman year, which is admittedly how most first-year success stories start. But I was paired with someone who could not have been more different from me. And not the kind of different in which a lifelong New York liberal rooms with a Midwestern conservative, living out a modern variation of The Odd Couple.

It was the kind of different in which my roommate regularly covered the room’s smoke detector with a plastic bag so he could smoke weed. The kind of different in which he sometimes did lines of cocaine off his desk.

He was a nice guy though, always willing to share his things with me. (He would offer me free tastes of his cocaine so politely that I felt bad when I refused.)

Sophomore year, I applied for on-campus housing with a friend. We wanted a room in one of the high rises, of course. But luck wasn’t on our side in the housing lottery.

We got stuck in the Quad again. It’s funny how a dream come true for a freshman can be such a nightmare for a sophomore.

We were the only sophomores in a hall of wide-eyed freshmen. We didn’t socialize much with them. We considered ourselves better than them because we were older, and they probably thought we were too weird to live with them.

The following year, I decided to room with another friend. Things were going to be better this year — we were destined to get a double with a kitchen.

But it was in Sansom Place East. A building that housed just a handful of undergraduates and hadn’t been renovated in decades.

And then came the e-mail. My friend and future roommate sent me a message over the summer to tell me that he was transferring from Penn to the University of Washington in Seattle. The subject line was aptly “brace yourself …”

So I started my junior year living with a stranger. Neither of us were particularly pleased with the living situation, but we got along just fine. About a month into the school year though, he decided to move out and get a single in the same building.

Right now, I have a double to myself. It’s more space than I need, but I’m enjoying it. I’ve pushed both beds together into a single giant one. I’ll probably be getting another roommate next semester, perhaps someone returning from studying abroad.

I’ve had a tumultuous experience with Penn housing these past few years. I think I’ll move off campus next year.

Due to the nature of this article, the author chose to use a pseudonym Return to the Housing Guide home page

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.