I know many of you are either thinking about which acceptance to accept or waiting to hear about your acceptances. Many of you may be thinking of leaving home for university and will have to decide within the upcoming months what to do about housing, off-campus or on campus housing? So, here are my two cents when it comes to choosing which to live in.
First off, I spent my first year at the University of Waterloo living "on-campus." I say "on-campus" because I lived in Columbia Lake Village South (CLV) and I like to call it the "off-campus experience on campus." As you may know, these are small townhouses arranged in rows of 5. Living space was decent in size. Beds were hard as rocks. For those who want to know the size of the beds, they are single beds. No air conditioning, so September was just a lot of sweating. Living room was huge and frankly, a waste of space, they should've either made the kitchen larger and extended it into the kitchen or had 2 rooms up on the second floor and 2 on the main floor. Entrance area had an unnecessarily large space with an electric heater on its own. There was some random storage room next to the dining room which they could have turned into a second washroom instead of having 4 people share a single washroom.
Being in a program such as computer science and engineering, we rarely used the living room or dining room and our storage room had nothing in it.
The community centre is where you had to go to get your laundry done, play pool, foosball, or ping pong, get you keys, and get your mail. I found the community centre to be quite lacking in comparison to other Residences. We only had 1 pool table that is smaller than regulation and 1 ping pong table.
Garbage disposal was done in one of the two parking lots with dumpsters and bins. We had to carry out the garbage in the middle of winter and walk outside, where you had to decide between going out in whatever you're wearing (we were all usually in a T-shirt, slippers, and shorts when I was in the house) and freeze or go take the time to bundle up and get undressed afterwards. For the record, we always opted for the former and I think that improved our immune system.
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