University is all about management. You have to manage your classes, social time, and sleep. But if you choose to move away from your parents’ house and onto CMU’s campus, you need to manage life on your own as well, which includes feeding yourself. If you are in dorms and on the meal plan at CMU, that will basically be taken care of for you. But if you choose to live in an apartment on campus, you will need to learn how to manage a refrigerator.
It’s trickier than you think. Fridges don’t automatically stock themselves with your favourite meals, and it’s very easy to lose food in the far reaches of your fridge. Just ask some of the students who live in CMU’s Katherine Friesen Apartments.
Two roommates in a CMU apartment spoke to the difficulty of not only losing track of food in your fridge, but losing track of whether the food is yours or your roommate’s.
“Last week I asked my roommate what he was doing with the rice and meat dish that had been in our fridge since I moved in back in September,” noted one CMU student. “He responded by telling me that he thought it was mine. To this day we don’t know whose dinner it was in our fridge for almost six months.”
That’s not an isolated case. One student has managed to house a jar of sweet and sour sauce in their fridge from the start of the year, and another set of roommates noted that they forgot a bag of chilli in the back of their fridge for several weeks. Upon discovering that it had turned fuzzy, they decided to keep it as a science experiment.
Not all fridges contain months-old forgotten food though. One student noted that a pack of organic flax meal was the strangest thing they could find in their fridge, which is quite impressive.
But fridges don’t just contain bizarre items; they also carry items of food that you just can’t get enough of. For current CMU students, it seems as though dairy products (or at least dairy-inspired products) were at the top of the list to have in their fridges at all times.
For one student, a big jug of chocolate milk is the most important thing to have on hand at all times. Whether for breakfast, or after a sports practice, it was essential to have. Another student couldn’t live without a container of yogurt in the fridge. Yet another student remarked that, “Life is good with a block of cheese.” Even a lactose intolerant student said a block of lactose-free marble cheese is an integral food for her to have around.
All of this is to say that university is a time of learning. You’ll no doubt learn how to organize your classes and notes, and possibly how to organize a fridge too. But you’ll also learn what things are important to you…both with respect to what’s important to have in your fridge, and what’s important to have in your life in general.
CMU’s next Campus Visit Day is this Friday, March 9. Spend the day with us, and find out if CMU is the right place for you.