Why we’ll miss Halls

Halls can sometimes get a bad rep but realistically can you slate the place where you met friends you’ll have for life, learnt to cook pasta and made it through your first year without mum?

The Cleaner

before

after

When someone’s got to empty the bins? When someone’s left mouldy milk on the side? When someone’s burnt pasta sauce onto the hob…again? Who you gonna call? The cleaner. Once a week your flat goes from bombsite to showroom. The mess quickly piles up again but everyone will miss the fairy godmother of a cleaner who magics away grotty kitchens while you’re in a lecture. Second and third year flat feuds over whose left two grotty pans on the side really make you miss the cleaner.

Your Surrogate Family

Family day out to the (pub) golf course

For most halls is your first time away from home. Those first few weeks when you’re missing your Mum and Dad you have your flatmate family. Perhaps making you a flat tea, asking you how your day’s been or watching TV- the presence of your flat fam stop you ringing home three times a day and spending your first weekend at uni booking train tickets for a visit home.

The Community

There is a sense of pride about which halls you descend from. Even when you enter your second year people will ask where you lived in first year and not care so much about where you live now. It made you who you are, it’s almost like a uni version of your hometown – you’ll defend it and stay loyal even if you know it’s shit.

Party, Party, Party

There’s always a group up for going out probably because pres can be so spontaneous. Go down to your mates flat in your PJs and an hour later your dolled up ready to hit the Toon. You shudder at the thought of finding houses a street apart from them next year let alone divided by a Metro line.

Halls are the training bra of living on your own

Flat Family

You may feel all independent about moving away from home but there is no doubt halls eases you into it. You don’t have to learn how to pay and budget for bills/ argue over paying bills. Heating is on tap so no realising parentless living is crap half way through your degree when studying for January exams in two jumpers and your dressing gown.

Getting things fixed for you

The kettle’s packed in. The hinge has come off the door. There is a handy man round straight away, no trouble, no charge and its replaced or fixed. Come second year you’re regretting buying the £5 toaster from Wilkos as you take a trip into town to replace it for the third time this semester.

Free Wifi

You don’t realise Wifi is pricey until you’re having to pay for it, and then no doubt it’ll be crap anyway cause you even when you went low budget it still seemed to be expensive. Halls were great for streaming Netflix all afternoon (in the first year days when the degree was still chill enough to get away with it) in a way you don’t appreciate until it’s gone. Halls Wifi is  free and fast.

Forging Friendships

Halls Night Out

Most people go on to live with the people they’ve met in halls and whether you end up thinking your second year flat dynamic surpasses first year there is no doubt you still have halls to thank for that. Your first year friends are the ones that meant you could say second year was better. Fair enough you probably won’t come out of halls loving everybody but there will be the core few who end up making all three years at uni the best years of your life.

Some people find themselves on a gap yah, most find themselves when they enter halls. The excitement of entering halls at the start of uni is always going to be more intense than moving in second and third year because it was the start of your uni life of new friends, independence and partying. You leave halls a different person to the day you entered them.