How Living in a Frat House Prepared Me for Life After College

No one outside of my brothers approved. My parents, my friends from home, and my friends in the dorms all thought moving into the frat house would spell disaster. Many of them had seen me grow from a lazy-ass freshman to well-read junior, and thought that living in the frat house would only regress me back to my freshman self. Given the typical (and stereotypical) frat house, their concern was not unwarranted.

To be truthful, our house wasn’t far from the stereotype. When you walked in the grimy floors greeted you. The couches in the living room might be in any number of positions, depending on what happened the night before. The kitchen might have looked like one in a restaurant, but I’m doubtful it would have passed a health inspection. At any time during the day you could go upstairs and find someone drinking. And yes, we threw parties about every other weekend.

It’s understandable, then, why friends and family showed concern. But after getting to know these guys for a few years I knew moving in with them was a safe bet. After all, the situation is only what you make of it. Instead of seeing a filthy, distracting environment I saw one that could potentially teach me things that the university didn’t offer in any classes. Living in a frat house was going to teach me about life.

While everything I learned could fill a volume the size of the Magna Carta, I can boil down the lessons to a few core ones that stuck with me for many years after graduation.

1. How to deal with a landlord

Anyone who lives in off-campus housing has to deal with a landlord in some capacity, but there’s nothing quite like a frat house dealing with a landlord. It seemed we had to call him once a week to report something broken. Whether it was someone leaving the oven on and torching the inside, or dropping a keg and breaking one of the stairs, we were in constant need of repair. And since it cost him money, the landlord never wanted to fix any of it. Let us fix our own mess.

Want to learn how to best deal with your landlord? Read your lease from front to back and then consult the state tenancy laws. That broken step? He had to pay for that. The oven was a slipperier issue, but by reading those documents I was able to convince him it was his responsibility. The chances I’d read the whole lease and the state tenancy laws if I lived in any old off-campus apartment? Close to none. This made dealing with post-college landlords much easier. I always got what I needed in a timely manner, because I knew the score.

2. How to make quick home repairs

While we got the landlord involved with the big repairs, we still broke little stuff all the time — stuff for which we ourselves were responsible. For instance: one time, while passed out on my couch, the guys decided they needed me for something or other. After knocking, loudly, one of them used his shoulder as a battering ram and plowed through my deadbolted door. To the Home Depot it was, getting a new door and lock.

There were plenty of even smaller things to take care of: loose floorboards, insecure lofts, tables and chairs with broken legs, and of course a whole host of plumbing issues. In fact, the greatest lesson I learned in all this was to always have a full slate of plumbing supplies at all times. When I moved into my first post-college apartment it all came naturally.

3. How to play authority to peers

How do you get a peer to listen as you tell him what to do? It’s not an easy task. Order around a peer and he’ll likely meet you with resentment and open defiance. But someone has to take charge when there are more than a dozen adolescents living under the same roof. So how do you manage people who consider you an equal?

It took a lot of trial and error, which meant a lot of people pissed off at me for a while. But eventually I got the hang of it. The key is to suggest something, and make it seem as though your peer had thought of it himself. That is, it’s more about having a suggestive conversation than giving an order. “Man, the shower is really filthy and John just scrubbed it top to bottom last week. Whoever took care of that this week would be a life saver.” And off he goes, brush and bucket in hand.

(The further lesson: you can make a chores list, but once the first person neglects his, the rest will follow in short order. Unless you live with an abnormally disciplined group it just won’t work.)

4. How to work amid distraction

If someone is blaring music at 10 p.m. in the dorms, you can knock on their door and tell them to turn it down. Dorms have rules, and moreover they have people to enforce those rules. In a frat house there are no rules; rules are frowned upon. So when the guy in the room next to you is rocking out to Slayer at midnight, there’s not much you can do. But that test isn’t going to study for itself, and it’s not as though the library is open at that hour.

The only thing to do is to power through it. It meant stopping every 10 minutes to take a breath and re-focus, but it was better than just giving up. Eventually those 10-minute increments turned into 15 and 20, and eventually I learned to tune out the distractions completely. This came in handy when working in a noisy, busy office. I could just sit back and tune out everyone, focusing on my work.

5. How to live with people (even those you don’t like)

Our faculty advisor once said something that has stuck with me through the years. “The world is bigger than the people you like.” It was his way of educating pledges and new brothers. You might not like some of your brothers, but that matters not; they are your brothers and you will treat them with respect. He might as well have been speaking about living in the house. With anywhere between 15 and 20 people living in the house, there were bound to be a few you didn’t like. Worse, there were plenty whom you did like, but who had habits you couldn’t stand seeing every day.

As it turns out, after college I lived with a friend who was — or wanted to be — a neat freak. He complained when there was a single dish in the sink. He hated the way the toilet looked so much that he once ordered me to pee sitting down. (Obviously he hadn’t learned Lesson No. 3.) We were great friends, but didn’t quite get along living together. That first year would have been much rougher had I not learned to live with five people I didn’t like, and another five whose habits disgusted me.

Don’t get me wrong: living in the house meant plenty of parties, debauchery, and all those things you see at frat houses across the country. But amid that 24/7 party were life lessons. Not everyone in the house found them, unfortunately. But they took me a long way in life. They taught me about myself and about others. My friends and family couldn’t have been more wrong. Living in the frat house didn’t regress me; it progressed me to a new level of awareness.