Careers Advice Blog

Who to live with in your second year

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Before I started my first year at university, I thought that choosing a house and housemates was pretty much in the last term on my list of priorities. However, people start to group up from about November. Although this is by no means necessary, it’s sometimes useful to stay ahead of the game and get an early start at looking at some potential student housing. Before you get cracking on that however, you need to decide who you want to live with.

The guy that is incessantly playing his ukulele, the girl who loves to shower at 6am right above your room and that one person who seems to come in drunk every morning aggressively slamming doors at 2am are probably not high on your list of people you’d like to choose to live with (unless you are one of the above, in which case: group together!). Yet, they have probably given you some valuable life lessons about choosing who you want to continue living with carefully.

There are three main groups people tend to move in with in second year: people from halls, subject friends or society friends. Each choice poses a great deal of scope for masses of fun, but also disaster. Here’s a brief low-down on the pros and cons of choosing from each group.

People from halls

This is probably the safest bet. You’ve lived with them before, so you’re largely aware of the weird and wonderful habits and quirks they have. There’s often quite a broad range of people in an academic sense, which avoids the potential claustrophobia of living with people solely from your subject.

Academic friends

Need help with phrasing an essay or working out some tough scientific theory? Look no further than the next door down… Living with people on your course is a great way to motivate yourself to work hard. It also means that everyone will be understanding when you’re losing the will to live under a heavy workload. The main problem here is that when you want a break from thinking about modernist theory or thermodynamics you’ll not find much of one inside the house!

Society friends

Society events are some of the best times you’ll have while at university, so it’s understandable to want to live with people who have a shared common interest with yourself. It means you get a nice mix of academia within the house whilst still having something in common. Plus, the journey to and from events will never be lonely again! The key downside here is that some people can be great friends to have for social events, but at home it’s a different story.

Do you know who to live with in your second year? Let us know in the comments below!

Photo: mrehan / Flickr

Stephanie HartleyWho to live with in your second year

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