Reconsidering the Needs of Communal Living
After weeks of anxious waiting, the accommodation offer from LSE finally arrived in my mailbox. At the rather expensive rate of around 120 pounds a week, I will have a single dorm room located at the heart of London, two blocks away from both the main campus as well as my new home station of King’s Cross (of the Harry Potter fame, as I discovered last weekend after watching the 7th movie). Yet, the uneasiness upon acknowledging the prospects of going back to that dreaded environment of school dormitory is somewhat outweighing the joy from not having to go out and find my own housing in an unknown metropolis. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that dorm life, more than classes, activities, or personal relationships, defined my four years of college life. The dorm-mates, for better or worse, became not friends but collectively a surrogate family: people you may not necessarily like at all, yet must spend time with in a regular basis. Their presence, no matter how unwelcome,