IF YOU’RE A SOPHOMORE AT NORTHWESTERN, YOU MIGHT ALREADY BE CONSIDERING YOUR LIVING SITUATION FOR NEXT YEAR. YOU’VE TAKEN NOTE OF THE FOR SALE SIGNS POSTED ON PROPERTIES AROUND CAMPUS, FOUND SOME POTENTIALLY COMPATIBLE ROOMMATES, AND MAYBE EVEN STARTED A PINTEREST BOARD FOR INSPO. EVEN WITH ALL THIS, YOU STILL CAN’T SHAKE THE FEELING THAT YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. AND THAT’S BECAUSE YOU PROBABLY DON’T. THE GOOD NEWS IS YOU’RE FAR FROM ALONE—THIS UNCERTAINTY IS A RITE OF PASSAGE FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS LOOKING TO LIVE INDEPENDENTLY FOR THE FIRST TIME.
YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE IT ALL FIGURED OUT EVEN AFTER YOU MOVE IN, AS MANY OFF-CAMPUS FIRST-TIMERS ARE NOW LEARNING. TO MAKE THE TRANSITION INTO LIVING INDEPENDENTLY A LITTLE LESS MYSTERIOUS, I TALKED WITH CURRENT JUNIORS NINA GEORGIEVA, SHAAFI FLENER, ANTHONY XIE, WILLIAM THAKUR, AND DYLAN MCGAHRAN ABOUT ABOUT THEIR QUALMS WITH AND TIPS AND TRICKS FOR SURVIVING OFF-CAMPUS LIFE.
Izzy Pareja: What do you miss most about living on campus?
Nina Georgieva: “I miss being close to everything, and being able to just go to the library because it’s right there. And the food, because I have to cook my own food now and I can’t just hit up the dining hall whenever I want.”
Shaafi Flener: ”Well I miss two things: the ready availability of food at the dining halls and also the time it took to walk from place to place.”
Anthony Xie: “Being forced to be on like a meal plan I guess, that’s definitely the biggest thing for me. I feel like if I lived in maybe a different place off-campus, I would also probably say distance, but my place is right next to Willard.”
William Thakur: “I think the biggest thing is also the food, like I lived in Plex so I could just go downstairs at lunch or dinner, I wouldn’t have to cook anything. That’s a lot more work.”
Dylan McGaharn: “Being able to just eat whatever, wherever I want with the dining plan. And just like being close to all my classes . . . I’m guessing you get that a lot.”
IP: It seems like being off of a meal plan is one of the bigger adjustments to off-campus living. How do you feel living off-campus has affected your eating habits?
NG: “I mean it definitely has a lot, just because I have full control over the food that I’m eating, so like I’m eating significantly healthier now, and also much less throughout the day because I can’t just stop at the dining hall for a snack.”
SF: “I just don’t eat more than like two meals a day now, because it’s really really hard to cook and then bring it to campus. And I feel like I have an obligation when I get up and I get to campus to get through all my classes and then stay on campus, because what normally happens is classes and club meetings, and I don’t really end up getting back to my house until about 8pm at the earliest. And so I end up in this weird situation where I just kind of skip that meal in the middle and just scrounge for like chips or something.”
AX: “Honestly, I feel like my eating habits are like . . . pretty much the same. I feel like I eat like, you know, three meals a day and like, snacks and stuff.”
WT: “Yeah, I don’t think it’s really changed much, I eat about the same amount. It’s maybe just the amount of time that goes into it.”
AX: “Oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
IP: What’s your favorite place to buy groceries?
NG: “Trader Joe’s! Because it’s cheap AF. And they have really good frozen meals that are ready really fast and I trust them.”
DM: “Jewel Osco, ‘cause they have everything. I like Trader Joe’s and it’s right across so I go there also, but you have to hit your Jewel Osco if you want anything that’s a normal brand.”
SF: “Probably Costco, cause they tend to have everything I want at much cheaper prices than places like Jewel Osco or Trader Joe’s or somewhere else”
DM: “I saw this man at Jewel Osco.”
SF: “I didn’t want to go there.”
AX: “Probably Trader Joe’s, even though I know that’s what everyone’s gonna say. I just, I love the vibe there, and I feel like the portions are a little bit more appropriate for just one person.”
WT: “I get groceries at Costco in the city and then I drive because it’s way cheaper. You can get like a lot at once.”
IP: Getting groceries is only half the battle when you live off campus. The next challenge is often putting them together to create meals on the go. What’s your go-to meal?
NG: “If I’m in a rush, it would be frozen food. If I’m just like, what’s my go-to-meal, it’s penne pasta with arugula and pancetta and alfredo sauce.”
DM: “Healthy Choice/Lean Cuisines, just any frozen meal that wasn’t too expensive that was also not bad for you. And then, just like chicken, broccoli, pan, oil, spices.”
SF: An avocado tuna bagel with everything seasoning or a chicken, rice, celery, onion concoction that I like to make at the beginning of the week.
AX: “Obviously just like pasta with like whatever sauce you have in the fridge. I also make these like Chinese Noodles with Chili Oil, it’s super easy to put together and it’s really good, but it’s really —-ing spicy though.
WT: “For lunch I have PB & J most days—It’s easy and convenient and it tastes good!”
IP: What’s your number one tip for students looking to live off-campus?
NG: “Learn how to talk to a landlord lowkey, like keep very very careful track of what the condition of everything is when you move-in, and like don’t be afraid to annoy the —- out of your landlord.”
DM: “Try to make sure that all of your maintenance stuff is handled before school starts, because then you just start putting it off.”
SF: “Don’t underestimate the time it takes to cook, don’t underestimate the time it takes to get to your classes, don’t overload your schedule because of that. Or also find a way to get to campus faster, so be it a bike or scooter or something else, like a skateboard.”
AX: “Location has like a huge impact on sort of the vibe of where you live. I feel like if you live closer to Evanston downton it’s like a cute little like ‘ Oh my god, I’m a college student in a college town.’ But if you live on like . . . I’m sorry but if you live on Noyes, like I’ve been up there and I’m just like wow . . . I’m 20, I’m in school and I’m struggling.”
WT: “Live so it’s closer to where you have classes. Like I’m living up north so I’m closer to Tech so I don’t have to walk as much. Or get a bike.”
FROM MEAL PREP TO MAINTENANCE REQUESTS, LIVING OFF CAMPUS CERTAINLY COMES WITH ITS OWN SET OF STRUGGLES. DESPITE THIS, STUDENTS SEEM TO KEEP PERSEVERING, EVENTUALLY ADAPTING TO WHATEVER CHALLENGES OFF-CAMPUS LIFE OFFERS.
FOR WNUR NEWS, THIS IS IZZY PAREJA.
![TREVOR RAINBOLT (via the GeoGuessr World Cup Grand Finale): Consus! The first official GeoGuessr World Champion. He did it from the qualifiers. He’s done it! He’s done it! GABE SHUMWAY: That was the culmination of GeoGuessr’s first-ever World Cup event. But what is GeoGuessr? It’s a video game you play using Google Maps, where you’re placed in a random Google Street View location and must guess where you are. You may recognize it from your TikTok For You page, where someone happened to guess Brazil based on the red soil. It may be something that you played with your friends, determined to find out where you were. But what makes this game so appealing? What is causing this surge in worldwide popularity? Today we set out to find the answers behind GeoGuessr’s meteoric rise. SPENCER McLAUGHLIN: I’m somebody who really likes geography, really likes maps. As somebody who kind of likes to think that I at least have a decent view of what the world looks like and what different parts of the world look like, this is literally just examining how well you know the world. EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: That’s Spencer McLaughlin, a Weinberg freshman here at Northwestern. He was initially drawn to the game through a YouTube video he watched nearly ten years ago. Even though he played the game in a history class, it never stuck until the pandemic. During this time, he picked it up again and began playing with friends regularly. Ryan Almeida is a visiting assistant professor of environmental studies at Hamilton College. He chose to become the faculty advisor of Hamilton’s GeoGuessr Club after falling in love with the game under similar circumstances. RYAN ALMEIDA: I really picked it back up during the pandemic – probably it was 2021-ish when I really got back into it. And I think a lot of people got into GeoGuessr during that time in part due to wanderlust and sort of not being able to travel. SHUMWAY: McLaughlin started a geography club at his New Jersey high school that quickly took to GeoGuessr as a form of entertainment. As the club gained popularity, the game became more competitive among its members. McLAUGHLIN: We had, like, a March Madness-style bracket where everyone could compete. We also had, like, when we were playing casually, a leaderboard system, where we had this really complicated Excel spreadsheet where you would put in your scores for individual games and it would give you like an ELO or, like, a rating for your place in the club. SHUMWAY: These competitions also take place at the college level, with schools competing virtually. Hamilton’s GeoGuessr Club has both hosted and attended various collegiate competitions centered on the game. ALMEIDA: You have two people per team. Each person places a guess where they think it is on the map, and then whichever guess is closest to the spot gets the most points and the highest score from each team is subtracted. And so the difference represents sort of the score for that round, and people are given a set amount of health. And so if one team gets 4,000 points, the other team gets 3,000 points, the losing team will subtract 1,000 points from the score. CRUZ: And last year, the world’s greatest GeoGuessr players gathered in Stockholm, Sweden, for the first-ever GeoGuessr World Cup, which ended with Patrick Noordijk, known as Consus, being crowned as the eventual champion. This year’s World Cup is already underway, with regional finals for the Americas taking place this weekend. Europe and Asia will have their own regional finals before the top 24 players globally square off in the two-day grand finale this September. But even if you’re not a pro at identifying random spots around the world, you can still find something to enjoy in GeoGuessr. ALMEIDA: There’s quite a diversity in the way students and folks approach how they’re going to figure out where they are. Some people clue straight into something like vegetation or the biome they exist in, right, looking for whether the trees look tropical or whether it looks like an arid climate or whether it looks relatively temperate. Folks can be really interested in looking for things like architecture or potential language clues, right, and I think a lot of that just has to do with sort of what people naturally gravitate to when they’re playing. And so I think one of the fun things about GeoGuessr is there's not really sort of one of those things that trumps the other, right. You really do need to sort of have this holistic view of the world. [music] SHUMWAY: For WNUR News, I’m Gabe Shumway. CRUZ: And I’m Edward Simon Cruz. Audio of Trevor Rainbolt taken from 2023 GeoGuessr World Cup: Grand Final Day](data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciIHZpZXdCb3g9IjAgMCAyMDQ4IDExNTAiIHdpZHRoPSIyMDQ4IiBoZWlnaHQ9IjExNTAiIGRhdGEtdT0iaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZ3bnVybmV3cy5vcmclMkZ3cC1jb250ZW50JTJGdXBsb2FkcyUyRjIwMjQlMkYwMiUyRmdlb3N0b3J5cGljLUdhYmUtU2h1bXdheS0yMDQ4eDExNTAuanBnIiBkYXRhLXc9IjIwNDgiIGRhdGEtaD0iMTE1MCIgZGF0YS1iaXA9IiI+PC9zdmc+)
