Is hall life over-romanticised? An introvert’s perspective on staying on campus

What do you envision as the apogee of college life? More than a handful would say it’s the experience of staying on campus.

Staying in residential dorms or halls has largely been sold as a dream for adolescents navigating the liminal space between teenage years and adulthood. For the first time, we are staying away from the watchful eye of our parents or caregivers. This unprecedented independence seems to open up so many opportunities. Not only are you able to spend every day with your best friends, you also have the freedom to express who you are and carve out your own unique space in life. On-campus living, or hall life, is a (trans)formative experience.

Coupled with the proverbial maxim that college is “the best four years of your life,” I used to view hall life in such a roseate lens – in a way, hall life had been romanticised for me. For those unacquainted with Internet vernacular, “romanticising” is a Gen-Z practice of falling in love with an activity, often through adopting a spirit of appreciation and treating the activity as an aesthetic object to be enjoyed. It also involves reorienting one’s thoughts to achieve a romanticised approach to life. While this is useful in helping us find the obfuscated joys in the everyday, it could also augment certain realities. As the end of my first semester draws near, I’ve come to find that, for introverts like me, staying on campus isn’t as simple as hanging out with friends 24/7 and being in control of how you spend your days. Hall life has shaken up the ways I approach my social life, and I hope to give some perspective on these challenges and changes.

Structures fall away.

Image by Riley.

I find it imperative to clarify, first and foremost, what being an introvert entails – at least for me personally. Introversion is commonly misunderstood as shyness or a dislike for social activities, but these do not necessarily overlap. While I gain energy through focusing on my internal thoughts over the external world, I also place high value on social interactions with others. Even though I find one-on-one interaction or interaction within a small group the most felicitous for forming deep connections, I also enjoy being in a larger group.

A huge element I love about hall life therefore is the plurality and spontaneity of interactions it affords. One moment I’d find myself having dinner conversations with a group of friends in the dining hall. The next moment I’d be attending a party with another. And soon later, I’d be pouring my heart out to someone else in the safe confines of their room. The best part is that all these activities seem to just fall into place: I do not need to be overtly planning my day.

The concomitant downside, though, is that there’s a relative removal of structure to your days – everything seems to meld together. Perhaps I’ve grown too accustomed to travelling to school in the morning, then commuting back home by sunset. Such a routine has structured my life and drawn both physical and conceptual boundaries between the many roles and settings that animate my life. But since I now both study and stay in school, these boundaries have fallen away.

Image by Riley.

This lack of boundaries is reminiscent of work-from-home (WFH) arrangements. Despite the upsides of WFH, I’m probably in the minority when I say I disprefer WFH. When the place you work is also where you eat and sleep, work seeps into the other areas of your life. Singaporean content creator Zachary Hourihane observes that the blurring of work and home along digital lines has led to both an increased inclination to contact workers outside of office hours, as well as an internal compulsion to remain plugged in: “there’s the expectation that you’re always on.” Staying on campus means that school – both the academic and social parts of it – is always “on”, even when I want to enjoy my personal time at a distance from school.

Needing such boundaries is not an exclusively “introvert” thing. Case in point: my extroverted friend who always greets people with unbridled energy. When I asked her if she felt the same way about the “over-romanticisation” of hall life, she instantly agreed. The vision of hall life that some have in mind – that staying in dorms means having endless access to parties – is untruthful, she finds. And just like me, there’s a personal distance between hall life and herself: she feels at home in the residential hall, but it’s not a home for her.

Image by Riley.

There then is a heightened need for self-discipline when staying on campus: we need to regulate our lives independently when physical structures no longer do so for us. This could be in the form of knowing the limit of your social battery and calling it a night – even when your friends say they want to continue partying. Reorient your thoughts about FOMO (“fear of missing out”) into JOMO (“joy of missing out”): for introverts, extroverts and ambiverts alike, reserving time for solitude is highly valuable for decompressing and recharging. Self-discipline could also look like knowing what to prioritise – your studies, your friends, yourself – and at the same time, understanding that priorities are never ossified and should be allowed to shift situationally.

Needless to say, establishing internal boundaries isn’t easy – much less maintaining and sticking to them. But now comes another challenge.

Socialising is never clear-cut.

Image by Riley.

One of the greatest resources hall life offers is the myriad opportunities for socialising, be it more formally at a hall-wide event or a student-run club, or more casually in the elevator or along the corridor. While being involved in everyone’s minutiae has made for a very vibrant time on campus, the reality is also that socialising will sap a considerable amount of your energy.

But beyond physical fatigue, socialising also exerts a mental pressure. I remember confiding in my off-campus friend at the start of the semester that it felt like the pressure was making me “lose my sense of self.” In hindsight, maybe I was being a little melodramatic. Yet, I surmise that many freshmen do face, to varying degrees, the seemingly inexorable anxiety to meet new people and make new friends in college. After all, your company is one of the biggest agents in shaping your four years of college, and as a result, people tend to be more deliberate in the impressions they project in school. Staying on campus then dials this anxiety up. Being in a social space 24/7 made a part of me pressured – or even guilty – whenever I stayed in my room: I felt like I should have been socialising, especially when I could still hear muffled, mirthful dialogue out the window. Socialising, in reality, is typified by antithetical feelings: it evokes happiness while also inducing pressure. But when we find ourselves starting to put socialisation before all other personal needs and wants, it’s time to recalibrate our balance.

Image by Riley.

A paradox in socialisation has also become glaring to me. Those who are a little more reserved at first or find it onerous to make the first move in social situations might be acquainted with this paradox: you don’t feel like socialising with the people around you because you don’t feel close to them – yet, this very lack of closeness stems from you not socialising. How then do you overcome this inertia, and develop a relationship from there?

For my friend and I at least, a deeper connection with each other is cultivated from interaction that extends beyond the setting of the school. This can involve watching a movie at a nearby theatre or having a meal outside. Such socialisation costs more time, coordination and energy, though, so we also maintain the realistic expectation that we can’t do this with every single person we meet. Nonetheless, many of these deep connections still start from school: the campus is the connective tissue between people from all walks of life. This is a very common and simple starting point for interactions in halls; one can initiate studying in the lounge together or grabbing dinner from the dining hall. To my Year 2 residential assistant (RA), social connection is crucial especially for freshmen, and he encourages availing of the communal spaces of halls. As an RA, he also invests in community events such as barbecue parties to further catalyse socialisation and foster closeness. Yet, he recognises that proximity can also breed problems: disagreements ineluctably arise and living together amplifies them. He advises, though, that “everything can be resolved with communication.”

Should I still be romanticising hall life?

Image by Riley.

Romanticising life is characterised by introversion: we inwardly restructure our perspective on things and reassign their meanings, even when this shifted perspective is removed from external reality. (It involves being a little “delulu” – without the negative connotations.) But instead of being lost in ideals, when we share so many everyday experiences together, I’ve come to find a more grounded appreciation for details. One afternoon, I found myself struck by the unassuming scene of a couple of us studying in a common room. The Sabrina Carpenter music playing from someone’s device. The frenetic beeping of the printer in the distance. The discontinuous shuffling of feet across the wooden floor. The cacophonous chatter that occasionally ballooned into synchronised laughter. These were happy distractions.

As the spirit of romanticism appeals, experiences are not one-size-fits-all: enjoyment comes from living one’s life deliberately and gratefully, whether it is the minute or the extravagant, the quotidian or the extraordinary. To some, the hall life they want to experience is predominantly partying. To others, socialising isn’t the main reason for staying on campus. Regardless, there is no ideal image for how staying on campus should look like.

In the broader sense, hall life is a simulacrum of adult life, the “trial run” of independent living in a scaffolded space. Even as we navigate our own growing lives on the verge of adulthood, there is a network of support – each other – that will break our fall when we make youthful mistakes. This autonomy, flexibility and togetherness are perhaps the true acme of the college residential experience.