Devil's Advocate: Should you move out of student accommodation?

YES: Avery Cohen

Let’s start with the question on everyone’s mind: why on earth would you actively choose to stay in student accommodation? Staying in halls is for the students who weren’t social enough to make any non-fresher friends their first year to take a flat over from or for those whose parents don’t trust them not to stick their fingers into an outlet and go up in flames. Neither group is particularly enticing to be a part of. Not to let my PTSD(RA) speak for me, but having a place to call your own, not subject to arbitrary or unjust university standards, is the starting point of adulthood. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t had a smug smile creep on my face every night in my non-hall home when I go to charge my phone in my EU adapter without the fear of it getting confiscated if I wake up too hungover to hide it during room inspection. Three years in, I’ve refused every opportunity to buy a UK plug for precisely that reason — trust me, the Brits won’t win this one. 

Now, this isn’t based on a salty pettiness about my own accommodation nightmares. Having spent the past three years between the Fife Projects and the Badlands, I’ll admit that my housing situation has not been reflective of my BNOC status as one of St Andrews’ finest. If you had the luck of living in town your first year and having all your meals catered for you, we have had radically different housing experiences. The closest I’ve come to pre-paid catering is mooching cold leftover curly fries off of the Aikman’s floor at close and calling it ‘dinner’. 

Life is just far too breezy and predictable when you have the comfort that you’ll still know when your next hot meal will be, no matter how stupidly you flush away all your student loans. Where’s the mystery? Importantly, how does that teach you the skills you’re supposed to be learning and growing from in your university days? What happens when you’re fresh out of uni receiving your first (of many) minimum wage paycheck, just to, at the ripe age of 23, discover that you can’t blow £1,200 on mixing decks in the hopes of launching a DJ career? Living outside of accommodation (allegedly) teaches you these things: how to manage money and what to prioritise. 

If you’re a second year — or worse, an honours student — living in student accommodation, you’re being deprived of more than you’re being given. At a certain point, I think we should all be entitled to a little privacy. The privilege to choose who you live with should not be taken for granted. Whether your vice is unforgivably loud sex on the communal living-room couch, doing your dishes bi-yearly, or waking up after a blackout to your flatmate asking why his fresh loaf of bread has a single bite taken out of it (my own flat’s trifecta-of-sin), strangers shouldn’t be subjected to that. Choosing the correct housemates to let you get away with your debauchery is step one of building up the blinded, impenetrable ego this town demands of you. 

I will leave you with a word of encouragement, something for those of you departing from halls this term and anxious for the road ahead. Upon asking a resident of South Street what he appreciates about his post-hall housing, his answer is one I believe to resonate with us all: “I can now have guns and raclette machines.” And what more could a university student be after? 

NO: Simon Ezra-Jackson

In a perfect world, I, too, would keep a hygienic distance from freshers. But needs must — and, this January, as the house hunt loomed, and my slew of toadying hints to graduating fourth years fell flat (“Your eyes are iridescent, John. What’s next for your flatshare?”) I sipped the bitter cup and accepted Mac for my third year. As it happens, the hemlock went down quite well — I’m now quite chuffed. Let me explain why. 

I’ll start with the glum side: staying in halls means sneezy, hyper eighteen-year-olds will be your main co-dweller. But do not fear! You and the other non-Freshers can huddle ‘round the far end of the canteen and glare at anyone who comes near, like a spooked centrist coalition hurling up a cordon sanitaire against the far-right. You’ll make fast friends with the other oldies — shared trauma tends to do that. 

Some might castigate hall-stayers as coddled, regressing back to an infant-like state of dependency and quailing from the scary HMO-filled world outside. I will wear that badge with honour. Hall life, especially catered, is indeed Jabba-like — you become a great quivering blob whose every need is attended to by hordes of attendants. No cooking, minimal cleaning, on-hand emergency electricians. The risk of being fed to the great sand-crusted maw of the Sarlac (failing your room inspection) is admittedly present — but, if things get hairy, you can always zhuzh round the lightsabre (hide the dirty dishes under the bed). 

 If disaster strikes in catered halls, the porter is a panic button away. Let’s say, to give a purely hypothetical example, you shut the lid of your waffle maker on the power cable, and, in an entirely unrelated sequence of events, the circuitry in your flat kitchen decides to blow out. In a DRA flat? No problemo. The emergency, pre-paid electrician will be quickly called by the on-hand porter, and the incident will be dealt with. If, however, a waffle maker-related calamity befalls you in a private flatshare? Good luck getting your bastard landlord round before Christmas. 

If thou still doubtest, let me remind you of the alternative. The flat hunt is the pits. Having to pay for heating means not paying for heating, which means taking your Aikman’s link-up back to your Siberian snow cave and, instead of rumpy-pumpy, doing a survival huddle by the space heater. And don’t get me started on your flatmates. Absent from the cleansing, Biblical fire of the DRA room inspections, I have heard tales of inch-thick dust layers mossing up bedrooms, of seeing something writhing amid last Friday’s dirty dishes.

Let me end with perhaps the greatest plus of Halls life: no matter how low you sink, no matter how whingeing your extension requests become, no matter what dire shape your love life curdles into, you will still come home and enjoy a feeling of life-giving moral superiority, for there will always be a seventeen-and-a-half year old shambolic enough to leave a margarita on the pool table. 

Illustration by Elizabeth Yang