My dorm is awesome.

I mean, the list of complaints is plenty long: it's a 10x10 concrete box with two people in it, we share our bathroom with another room and it's a 3x10 concrete box; it looks a LOT like a prison cell, the floors are cold concrete; the windows are shit and there's a bad draft; the door rattles; we're on the fourth floor; we don't have a kitchen or a starbucks or a gym or any of the other fancy amenities; laundry is downstairs and we have to go outside because there are no horizontal hallways. Parking is also inconvenient.

On the other hand, it's about 370 a month, which is pretty hard to beat around here. On top of that every single utility is covered, laundry is free, and the bathroom gets cleaned for us. I'm also a seven minute walk from practically every building on campus, which means I can access anything I want any time I want. Assistantships, internships, study groups, tutoring, help sessions, special events... anything I want. I never have to rely on a bus and I don't have to pay for a car, which saves me tons of time and money. All repairs are made within 36 hours and I don't have to do anything except submit a report. I can make it eighty degrees in the winter and seventy in the summer if I feel like it and not pay anything extra. Taking out the trash involves walking two steps into the hallway and using the community can. The shower is very powerful and very hot and you can fill the whole room with steam in about seventy seconds. I have legs of steel from climbing at least a dozen flights of stairs every day. My roommate is awesome and hilarious and we've got each others' backs. The library is a two minute walk and has a great selection of DVDs just in case Netflix doesn't interest me. Lastly, being a 10x10 concrete box, we can Swiffer the floors (wet and dry!) in nine minutes, scrub the sink, fridge, and microwave in four, and dust in five, so our room is fucking spotless.

Not gonna lie, most of the reason why I love it is the price (more than being cheap, it's covered by my financial aid, which rent sometimes isn't). If you count your free time as only $5 an hour, commuting about fifteen minutes to school and about fifteen minutes from adds up to almost twenty-five bucks a week down the hole. That's a hundred a month you spend stuck in traffic, not including the cost of a bus pass or using a car, and that's if you're valuing your free time below minimum wage. I think I'm getting a pretty good bargain for having, functionally, no commute.