One of the most textbook experiences in university is staying in a dorm. One of my favorite movies, Pitch Perfect, is about how amazing university life can be when you’re staying in a sorority house with girls who are determined to win the a-cappella world championships. However, in contrast to what is shown in this movie, not everyone dreams of the experience of seeing a stack of unwashed dishes in their common sink or being messaged to come to the kitchen to help capture a spider. Staying in a dorm is something I have the privilege of experiencing in a university that cares greatly for creating a sense of community between students who ask their friends to go out for a late night ice cream run, despite having a Kanji quiz for breakfast the next day.
Either way, whether you have lived in a dorm, are living in a dorm, aren’t or don’t want to, I think exposing the reality of dorm life is always a fun topic. Personally, this is my first time living away from home, and everything I used to know about living in a dorm came from my embarrassing amount of screen time spent on TikTok and Instagram reels. As my first year is coming to an end, I am happy to present to you my takeaways from dorm life, written from my dorm room positioned like I was meant to guard the campus and log all those who enter it. Allow me to attribute these takeaways through focusing on an interesting talking point about our dorm: the walls.
The walls of my dorm are gray, unpainted concrete. I thought it gave an artsy and brutalist feel to it, but some of the people I have shown it to have said it looks similar to a prison cell. I have also shared stories about the nights when I have woken up from hitting my head on them while taking a nap. Rightfully so, because for most of these naps I probably should have been doing my homework. I feel like they have been very representative of my experiences, though.
When I first entered the dorm, the only thing I thought of was its necessity. Like the cold, hard walls, the purpose of living in a dorm was clear: having easy access to school, facilities to be able to feed and take care of myself, and space to focus on schoolwork. No warmth was expected, the dorm does its job whether you make it work or not. To make it easier on myself, I refused to decorate it with anything because I knew I’d be in and out within less than a year. With these realities pressuring me to remind myself that this was a training ground to breed my own sense of responsibility came mornings where I would run to get myself to first period simply because I was too appreciative of its convenient location, just short of a 5 minute walk from my classroom.
This was until one of my first teachers in university gave my classmates and I pictures of our moments in class, and it became the first thing I put up. Then I started to put up some handwritten letters from family at home, then pictures of my friends whom I met within these same walls, that we took in a photo-booth after our first “expedition” as a group to Shin-Okubo. The snacks in my closet started being filled from snacks I used to already be familiar with from back home to ones with unfamiliar writing that my friends would share with me while we would attempt to “lock in” together in the lounges. These same, sad walls, heard the conversations I was never used to starting within the walls I had back at home. They watched me become friends unintentionally with the people I would happen to have the same dinnertime with.
I started focusing less on what the walls looked like because I barely saw them anymore. I started seeing different kinds of walls. These were from the dorms of my other friends where I would patiently wait in the lobby for them to come down or from the buildings to watch a movie in Shinjuku or to eat in a restaurant with no one else but us in Shibuya.Â
When you have friends who live around, you might get the occasional “Do you want to go for a walk?” text message, and the best thing I’ve learned from living in the dorm is never saying no to them. When mixed with the feeling of being responsible for getting to class, you will also get to learn a lot about yourself when you come home from Karaoke at three in the morning and have a class just six hours later.Â
The walls that once watched me refuse to look at the dorms at anything else but a shared living space became the safe space that let me choose when I was ready to leave them. Silent, still cold, and unchanged, the walls gave me the structure I needed when I was unsure of what my life would become in the next year, doing the job that I didn’t know walls could have.Â