Ah, the dorm life. Living in the residence halls can be oh so wonderful, mostly due to the fact that you are experiencing ultimate simplicity and convenience.

You wake up, roll out of bed and mosey down to food service where 47 different kinds of breakfast cereal greet you every day. On the occasional morning you enjoy french toast or pancakes.

Grab a sack lunch and you’re off to class, which is usually only a brisk five- to 10-minute walk unless you are an inhabitant of the Towers.

At night, the dorms set the scene for a superb social atmosphere. What better way is there to avoid studying than go to the den and have chats with the other people who are searching for a way to ignore their biology or calculus problems?

There is always, without fail, someone around that will want to talk or go to the rec center or order a pizza.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? And for a while, it is.

But then one day you are suddenly disenchanted with the chicken Parmesan at food service. The thought of how many people you are sharing a bathroom with begins to get under your skin. You begin to wish your next door neighbor would finally give up trying to learn how to play the guitar (especially at 1:30 a.m.).

The time has come. You decide to move off campus.

Now that you have made your choice, you have several details to consider. Who will you find to be roommates with? How can you expand your culinary skills past spaghetti and macaroni and cheese? Most importantly, how will you convince your parents that it would be way cheaper to live in a house or apartment than in the dorms?

The search begins. Standards that start out extremely high tend to drop after a couple of weeks of calling and checking out places to no avail. You start out insisting that the place you will live absolutely must be within a couple blocks of campus, decent looking, and above all — cheap. In the end you may settle for a home that is a mile or so off campus.

You can easily justify this fact by only telling people how far it is by bike as opposed to by foot. (For instance, the house I live in now is a five- to 10-minute ride into campus, but a good 25 minute walk for me to reach the building where I have my first class.)

You shift your priorities from decent looking to not really really crappy looking, and you begin an internal compromise about exactly how much you would be willing to pay for a house with a slightly grimy kitchen and a problem with ants.

If you begin to feel desperate enough to spend another semester unlocking your bathroom door and respecting 23 1/2 hours quiet hours during dead week, have faith. There are people to help you find some living quarters. One place that can be a light in your path out of the residence halls is the Off Campus Center in the Memorial Union.

They can work house-hunting magic. For instance, if you are looking for a three bedroom apartment, they can plug that into a computer and give you a print-out of all the three bedroom apartments in Ames that they have listed. They even throw in a map of Ames so you don’t have to drive all over town to figure out where it is.

While this is a great service the university does for students, it also seems to be one of the best-kept secrets of the campus. It seems that most people I talk to have never heard of this office before. Make use of these resources, and save yourself some hassle.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with living in the residence halls. I truly liked living there for my first two years of college. If you do decide to move off campus, best of luck to you.

I’ll see you in the grocery aisle when Martha Gooch is on special. As for the rest of you and your chicken Parmesan, bon appetit!

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Joanne Roepke is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Aurora.