Greetings all! Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and new year! I've been back in Cambridge now for a little bit over a week and have just started to ease my way into Lent term. It was nice to get out of England for the past month or so, but it's great to be back now! It's a bit chillier than it was when I left, but at least I won't have to walk through tons of snow to get to lecture like I have had to in the past couple of years, at least I hope so...
In any case, as you can tell from the title, the topic of this post is about moving back into Cambridge. You might recall that I wrote a post about moving out for the Christmas vacation because they had to use these rooms for housing and interviewing prospective Cambridge students. Luckily, this post should be relatively short, as moving back went well quite well for me with no unexpected surprises.
Unexpected surprises you might ask? Yes, when you store belongings for extended periods of time, you always run the risk of having them damaged in some way, shape, or form, generally due to environmental factors like humidity. I have heard too many stories where students came back to their storage rooms to find mold growing on their things. Not exactly what you want to find when you're just about to start a new term of the school year!
In any case, it's goes without saying then that you want to get your belongings as soon as you can upon arrival in Cambridge, especially if you've had to store your things in a shared storage area. The earlier you get your things, the earlier you can assess and repair any potential damage to your belongings. As a somewhat post-facto note about moving out, one useful thing you can do is to wrap everything in bags. Yes, that even includes your luggage! That way you can isolate your belongings from the surrounding environment of the storage area and that should lower the chances of anything happening to your belongings environmentally speaking.
Once you have all of your belongings and have checked back into your room, it's really a matter of taking everything out and putting things back where they belonged or perhaps even rearranging things in a new format, including the furniture in your room. It's a new year! Time to start fresh! I generally put everything back where they were last term, but I made a few tweaks to the organization that have worked out well for me so far! One word of warning though, as you will have to move out again at some point, if you do move around the furniture or any of the provided furnishing, take pictures before you do so. Remember, housekeeping expects everything to be back where they were at the start of term! Otherwise, you will face detriment charges.
Well, that's all I have to say about moving in! As I said, this was supposed to be relatively short, so once again, happy new year, and for my MIT readers, enjoy your IAP!