Your guide to residence life

Moving into a school from the comfort of your home can be a challenging transition and one which might take some time to get used to. It’s usually not what you expect it to be, which is why settling in might take some time and effort. Although the school usually gives you a lot of information about what you should be packing, expecting, and other necessary information, it won’t hurt for you to know a couple of things before taking this transforming step. Here is your guide to residence life.

Time Management

It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re in a boarding school as you don’t have any tuition and your parents aren’t there to nudge you to be productive. This means that you need to learn how to utilize your time wisely. Thus, I would suggest that you have a tight hour-to-hour schedule for yourself – where you assign every hour to doing some task or something related to leisure. But if you’re like me, and would like a bit more of a flexible schedule, then you can keep your schedule a bit more flexible.

Food

Although this would be more of a concern for vegans and vegetarians, if you are picky about food, then you’re in for a fun ride. No matter how hard a school tries, there will always be complaints about the food options and sometimes the quality. For this, I suggest to be mentally prepared to not always finding something of your liking. Adapting to food from different cultures is one of the reasons you’re studying abroad, so consider it as a challenge and try to adapt to it as much as you can.

Climate
This can be a significant factor when you’re choosing a school, especially depending on where you’re from and what climate you’re used to. When I moved from India to New York, it took me longer to adapt, or rather accept, that it gets freezing during winters. That being said, make sure you have the appropriate clothing based on where you’ll be going to study. In this case, it is definitely better to have more-than-necessary clothes and be wrong rather than have less.

Money Management
Ordering pizza, buying protein shakes, getting a hold of the latest Yeezys, there are an infinite number of ways to exhaust the money that your parents gave you (which should’ve lasted a couple of months, not weeks – oops!). This is why you have to learn about money management. You can do this by keeping a monthly or weekly spending cap and then keeping tabs on what you’re spending and where. After a few weeks or a couple of months, you’ll unconsciously start spending consciously- which sounds ironic but trust me, it works!

Ready for the challenge? EF Academy international boarding schools provide a thorough preparation for university by teaching independence and intellectual curiosity.