Living Off-Campus

Thursday is House Dinner at my 24 West Wheelock Street, the house where I live, also know as “The Loveshack”. I live off-campus in a house with seven of my closest friends and every Thursday night at 6pm we cook dinner together, go over house business, and catch up on one another’s lives. After your first year at Dartmouth you can choose to live off-campus if you so desire and about 10% of students take the plunge and enter the world of paying rent, navigating landlord-tenant relations, and being responsible for cleaning the refrigerator. Most of the off-campus houses are owned by local real estate agencies and although they normal street addresses are” given nicknames by the students. I currently have friends living at “3D”, “The River Ranch”, “La Derrière”, and “The Grays”. My house is small, rambling and red, and you know, a little old place where we can get together. It’s been named “The Loveshack” for “as long as people can remember”, which in a four-year institution means at least four years.

Off-campus living is definitely not for everyone. The conveniences of living in a dorm are numerous – no worries about paying rent every month, the word “utilities” is not a daily concern, there is always toilet paper, and your bathroom will be cleaned more than once every 10 weeks. However, as a senior, the inconveniences of this minimum level of self-sufficiency are outweighed by the independence and sense of place offered by the off-campus environment. I live with a group of people I want to see every day. We share a space, live by rules we set for ourselves, and actively build our own community in our house. House dinner is but one institution we abide by every week to keep our home lives happy. Chore charts, mandatory snuggle raids, hot chocolate study breaks, BBQs in the backyard, sunbathing on the roof, and attempting to grow flowers by the front stoop are integral parts of living outside the confines of dorm life. Living off-campus also provides its own social network and this weekend we’re having a progressive dinner party going from off-campus house to off-campus for a different course, from hors d’oeuvres to dessert.

Tonight however, it’s time to clean the kitchen after our veggie lasagna, salad, and ice cream. This means putting our “Loveshack” CD in our old-school 1994 boombox and blasting the mix made by yours truly featuring The Loveshack and other great ‘80s tunes. Doing dishes has never been so much fun.