The extent to which i will stalk...

...my new apartment.

So after months of waiting, calling UAH with as friendly of a phone voice as possible, googling the street view of the SIPA building (does anyone else think it's slightly...departmental?) and surrounding areas, and of course going through the UAH building descriptions and 360 virtual tours ad nauseum, I finally received my housing allocation.

Within minutes, I emailed my potential new roomies with an introductory description of myself and a list of things they would probably want to know about me...things like how I'm a night owl, how I'm asian so the occasional soy sauce smell wafting through the apartment may occur, and of course how I just love cleaning. I'm sure the transparency of my email wasn't missed. Really, I just wanted to know whether I'm walking into a dream or a nightmare of a living situation. And yes, I even admit to googling my future roomies. (who doesn't?!)

The point is this: the vast majority of us SIPA students aren't native New Yorkers.

And as much as SIPA will be about the classes, the professors, the group projects, it will also be about living. Our experience won't be limited by our academic endeavours, but what we do and who we talk to and how we live outside our classes. Sure, you can always escape to the library and use your apartment just as a bed and storage locker, but the potential here is for so much more. I imagine staying up with my fellow SIPA students, with a bottle of cheap wine and some leftover grapes from a speaker series, dangling our legs over the balcony and debating about whether Mugabe will actually step down and when/if he does, what that'll mean for those kids we dream about saving from poverty. I imagine running out into the hallway at 3am the night before a paper is due, screaming in panic with each other, then running back into our study and getting back to it. I imagine learning about different cuisines, and swapping stories of how we screwed up on our first day of internship.

I imagine it all.

But only time will tell the accuracy of my imagination. For all of our sakes, I hope my imagination is but a stark disappointment to what really awaits us in the next two years.