Campus-living authority

nontraditional
Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:28:22 +0000

If you have extraordinary circumstances that you don’t think they’ve adequately considered (if, for example, “my friend’s living status is dependent on this” is your way of saying “my friend is literally going to die if we can’t live together”), write another letter, make it very clear what your argument is, and do a better job with the supporting documentation.

“I don’t want to live in the dorm,” “I know people who did not like living in the dorm,” “I don’t want to spend as much money as it takes to live in the dorm,” and “I want to live with my friend, who is not attending your school and can’t live in the dorm,” and so on are not extraordinary reasons. Those are regular everyday reasons all kinds of people don’t want to live in the dorm. School administrators already considered those reasons when they made the rule and already decided that the communal living experience is sufficiently important to outweigh them. If your “impregnable stance” is that the rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to you, you are going to find that almost nobody other than you takes that stance seriously.

Cards4Life is exactly right: if living off campus is as important to you as you say it is and if you don’t have significantly better reasons than you’ve already offered, then the University of Montana is not the right school for you right now. Why don’t you withdraw, spend a year at a community college while living non-dormantly with your friend, and then transfer to the University of Montana with enough credits to avoid the residency requirement?