There are two kinds of people at the University: those who live off campus and those who live on campus.
And by people that live on campus I am not referring to students in the dorms; in fact, the residence halls are more a cult than a living situation. They all eat together, sleep together, study together and go fishing in the same dating pool. No, the dorms are not on campus living. By on campus living I refer to the area directly surrounding campus: The cluster of apartments on 17th Avenue and Alder Street (you know somebody who lives there; trust me, you do), or Hilyard House (the gated community of the University campus), or maybe in one of those more-than-slightly run down houses that seem to populate the 15th Avenue and High Street area (this is the place where beer pong tables double as lawn ornaments).
Students who live on campus are about as unique a bunch as can be, considering that the majority of the University does live within a five minute walking distance from class. Living on campus seems to be dorm life, only better: You can roll out of bed at 7:50 and still make it to an 8 o’clock class, drop-ins to fellow students’ homes are common, and Friday and
Saturday nights tend to be filled with multiple social events as well as sometimes intoxicated shouting to fellow partygoers milling around on a quest for cheap Mexican food.
The on-campus clan fears neither molding apartment walls nor inaccessible landlords, but they do tend to have an overwhelming phobia of Willamette Street. In the eyes of the student population, Willamette Street is where the University ends and Eugene begins. Students wonder, what kind of people not attending college live in Eugene?
Hippies? Or maybe ex-hippies? Does Eugene have a class of rich citizens, or perhaps a Eugene suburbia?
Questions such as these remain unanswered because the on-campus clan tends to shy away from places that cannot be reached with a five- to 10-minute walk. Not that I’m generalizing.
And then there’s the off-campus crew. We’ve crossed the Willamette street barrier and ventured out into Eugene, in hope of lower rent or more stable housing than the University area can offer. We pride ourselves with a familiarity of the city that we secretly hope those on-campus livers haven’t had the opportunity to gain. It’s a rugged life of inserting 15- to 40-minute travel times into our morning routine, but we admirably deal with such hardships because at the end of the day, the peace and quiet of leaving the University behind is something to be cherished.
Living off campus means that if the act of party attendance involves a series of designated driver plans, usually solved with the aphorism “Let’s drive now and worry later.” This leads to a number of Saturday morning runs to go pick up the car, but would we trade those stomach churning hung-over jogs for a relaxed morning of fried eggs at the Glenwood? Well, maybe. But there’s nothing better than returning home, car intact, to fry up some eggs of your own and spend the afternoon lazing around and shooting the crap with roommates in the backyard.
Having a house or apartment off campus also usually means that bedrooms, living rooms and especially kitchens give you some space to move around. On-campus housing tends to value quantity over quality, shoving hundreds of apartments into a complex the size of a double car garage.
Off-campus spaces have that little extra leg room that is perfect for healthy roommate relations as well as the occasional house party.
It’s a hard choice between on- or off-campus living; so many pros and cons either way. On campus housing may be convenient, but in the words of Jack Handy, on the other hand, we have different fingers. Think about it.