Finding an apartment is hard. Finding an apartment in a new city and coordinating things with roommates I've never met is even harder. Grad school is kind of weird- it's not like college where you just get assigned to a dorm room your freshman year. Graduate housing is limited and most people have to live off campus. The problem is, housing in Richmond is expensive (especially if you get a single bedroom apartment). So I put my name on a list of physical therapy students that are looking for roommates and just asked if anyone wanted to get a 3 or 4 bedroom place and split rent. Luckily, some of the girls responded and now there are 3 of us trying to decide on a place together.
I made the drive into Richmond twice within a week to look at a bunch of different places. The second time I went with my mom and we went to about 7 or 8 different places in appointments only half an hour apart! That was a little exhausting to say the least.
The first place my future roommates and I initially liked was a house in Church Hill. It's a huge 3 bedroom townhouse less than 5 minutes away from the MCV campus where we'll be attending classes. I picked up some rental forms for us to fill out. However, after I talked about it with several people who are familiar with the Richmond area, I discovered that Church Hill isn't the safest place to live. Apparently the neighborhood near this house was in a particularly bad area. I'm so thankful we figured this out sooner rather than later, but still, it was a bit of a downer. I felt like nothing had been accomplished by my 2 trips.
That wasn't completely true of course. I had really liked one of the other places I'd looked at before, but the problem was that they hadn't been able to show me the 3-bedroom apartment while I was there. So my mom and I had to drive back a 3rd time to Richmond to make sure we liked this place. It seems like a go and I sent in my security deposit today, so hopefully this all works out!
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