What Happened When I Left My Dorm Room Door Open

I remember like it was yesterday. Moving in freshman year at the end of August, all our new resident advisors did the typical icebreaker stuff to try and get us to make friends with each other. After we got done with going over rules, guidelines, and social activities, everybody went back to their respective rooms to do some good old “I barely know you” conversation with their new roommates.

We all had our doors shut, not really looking to branch out yet.

 

I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with what we were doing right off the bat. Someone being too outgoing and comfortable would probably make me a little uncomfortable, to be fair. About a week or so into it, we started to prop the door open, though. This resulted in a few people floating in from down the hall, even a few other students in the building that we went to high school with. On top of us gradually adopting an open door policy, our room was also significantly bigger than other ones, allowing us to have an entertainment center thrown together with an old couch from my living room and a 40 year old TV stand.

Who doesn’t love a SpongeRobert gif?

Some on our floor did this, others didn’t. The ones who did got to know the four of us and we got to know them pretty well. I’d say that by mid-year, almost everybody who adopted the open door policy was decent friends with each other. This was the majority of our floor, and not as common as we assumed throughout the building. That made us pretty unique, with 15-20 people hanging out together instead of driving home or somewhere else every weekend like a lot of people seemed to do at our school.

Most of the building had crickets on weekends, but not our floor.

At the end of it all, four years later, it’s safe to say that a decent amount of meaningful friendships were developed because we didn’t just run into our rooms and shut the doors. It’s an easy thing to do, don’t get me wrong. There’s a certain degree of anxiety faced by most people when it comes to branching out and meeting new ones. But getting past that can be incredibly rewarding. Don’t get me started about why you should go on a group study abroad trip.

Also-consequences aren’t necessarily bad results.