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Moving into college dorms is exciting. It is the first time living on your own for most people, and most students cannot wait for moving day to arrive. Living in college dorms can be a lot of fun — but it can also be stressful. Living with others is never easy; whether you live with your best friend or a stranger, there is always potential for issues to come up.

 

If you’ve never lived with anyone outside of your family, it can be especially difficult to handle these problems because you might not see them coming. In order to make sure you have a great living environment, you need to put forward effort into being a great roommate. Here are some ways to do that.

Roommate Contract

Once you’ve been living with someone for a while, it’ll become easier to notice problems — and more difficult to deal with them. This is why you should try to avoid issues before they become problems. You can do this with a roommate contract.

 

Roommate contracts are basically agreements covering basic rules that you and your roommate should stick to. In a roommate contract, you will address concerns such as:

 

• When is it okay to bring people over? Should you check with your roommate first?
• How often should the kitchen be cleaned? How long is it acceptable to leave dishes in the sink?
• How often should you clean the bathroom? How will you rotate if you share a bathroom?
• What is the proper way to address roommate issues?
• Is it okay to have pets?

 

These are some of the more tangible details that are easy to decide. You should also talk about other details that may not be as easy to create concrete boundaries for. For example, if either of you will be doing homework at home, you can designate study times or places. This can be more difficult since you might not always work in the same place or at the same time, but having your work interrupted or even having to multitask can negatively impact your work and success in your classes.

Make Life Easier for Both of You

Once you’ve covered some ground rules, you can take it a step further and do things that will make life easier for both of you. This can be as simple as decorating the place for it to feel more comfy. Of course, you shouldn’t cater to their needs or buy something that you don’t want to use, but if you can find a few things that will make living together more convenient, it can make a positive difference in the atmosphere at home.

Temperature Control And White Noise

Temperature can be an area of disagreement between roommates. Maybe you are each comfortable at different temperatures in the house, maybe one of you is more dedicated to conserving energy to save money on electric bills.

 

If this is the case and you prefer a colder environment, you can buy a portable air conditioner for your room. If energy is a concern, you can get an energy-efficient A/C to keep your bills down. This way, your personal space will always be the temperature you want it to be, and you won’t have to keep arguing about it with your roommate.

Task Whiteboard

When filling out a roommate contract, cleaning schedules should be addressed, but they can be difficult to reinforce in the future. To keep everyone organized, you can keep a task whiteboard in a common area, like the kitchen or living room. This can make it so that you can all clearly see whose turn it is to clean the kitchen and bathroom, and you can mark when you’ve finished a task.

 

Here, you can also schedule in roommate meetings. Since grievances are bound to come up, no matter how big or small, it is a good idea to be able to communicate to each other when you need to talk to each other. To make sure that these meetings don’t get intimidating, you can have them every other week or once a month, or you can set meetings up to talk about positive points in your living situation.

Look Out For Each Other

You don’t have to be best friends with your roommate to work well together. However, just because you don’t hang out with them all the time — or at all — doesn’t mean anything is wrong. This also doesn’t mean that you can’t care for each other. Try to make time to talk to them and get to know them when you are in the living room or kitchen together, and let them know about yourself, too.

 

While talking, you may even get comfortable enough to talk to each other about personal details. Sometimes, you can find things out about your roommate that might concern you, like noticing that they talk to you about going out to party a lot, or you might notice they are regularly intoxicated.

 

While there is some partying to be expected in college, you can also reach out for help if you are concerned they might be addicted to or abusing substances. According to addiction and recovery experts, “for young adults in their college years, the most commonly abused drugs are alcohol and prescription drugs.” Most colleges offer on-campus resources to help with such circumstances which you can look up on your school’s website, or reach out to people who are there to help, such as resident assistants, resident directors, teachers, or counselors.

 

Throughout your life living in the dorms with a roommate, keep in mind that everyone has their own perspectives. If you have a problem with your roommate, try to remain calm and have a straightforward and understanding conversation with them. If you put your best foot forward and try to be the best roommate ever, you will be miles closer to enjoying your first year at college.