Living on campus and dorms is one of the best ways to experience college life and it can be a way to develop relationships that will last a lifetime. If you’re about to move into the dorms or you already live in them, securing your room is critical. Living in close quarters with so many other people can lead to security issues with your stuff at some point. When you’re living on a college budget, you need to make the most of the things you have and not risk losing them to someone with sticky fingers. Here are five tips to keep in mind when you want to secure your dorm room at school.
1. Always Lock the Door When You’re Away
One of the most basic and most important tips that you can keep in mind is always keeping your door locked when you’re away. This may seem elementary, but you’d be surprised how many students overlook this. They run downstairs to do some laundry or to talk to someone in another room and they forget to lock the door. While you may get by with doing this occasionally, it only takes one time of leaving your door unlocked to have something valuable stolen. Get in the habit of keeping your key with you and locking your door every time you leave the room. And you can further secure your room by changing doors. Yes, it may seem a little extreme, but I know that the door to my dorm room was nowhere near as secure as modern composite doors would be.
2. Don’t Share Keys
When you live in the dorms, don’t share your keys with anyone else. Sometimes, people give their keys to other people to hold or to keep safe. If you want to make sure that your room is safe, you need to keep your key with you and don’t give it to anyone else for any reason. When the key is outside of your reach, you have no control over what happens to it. Someone that you trust could take advantage of having your key and steal something out of your room.
3. Hide Your Valuables
As a general rule, you should probably keep most of your valuable things outside of your dorm room. Keep it at your parent’s house or at a friend’s house. However, if you have to keep something valuable in your room (laptop, cell phone, etc.) keep it hidden. Don’t just leave your valuable stuff sitting out where anyone can see it. If someone to decide to sneak into your room, they may not want to dig through all of your dorm to find something. However, if something is sitting out in the open, they will be much more likely to take it and run.
4. Get a Safe
Another way to protect the valuable items in your room is to get a safe. You don’t have to buy the most expensive and biggest safe on the market to keep your stuff safe. Just buy a small safe that you can keep up in your closet or under the bed to put your valuable items in. This way, even if someone does break into your room, they probably won’t be able to get into the safe and take your important things.
5. Get on the Same Page with Roommates
If you have a roommate in your dorm room with you, you’ll need to make sure that you are both on the same page. This means that you should discuss your security concerns with your roommate to make sure that he or she follows the same rules as you. For example, it won’t do you much good to always lock your door when you leave if your roommate leaves the door wide open when he leaves. If you both follow the same rules, you’ll have a much better chance of protecting your stuff.
Useful Articles
- Outfitting Your Dorm Room for Safety – collegestudentsafety.com
- Dorm Room Security Products – dormco.com