Our textbook defines territoriality as a “strong attachment to or defensive control of a place or an area.” To me, this can be very easily related to college, especially when it is related in particular to living in a dorm, apartment or house with at least a couple of other people. Growing up, I lived in a three-bedroom home; I had one brother and one sister. Naturally, until my sister moved out when I was 13, my brother and I shared a room – thus sharing almost everything. Back up a year, heading into seventh grade I transferred to a private boarding school that was about two-and-a-half hours away from home. As such, I stayed there during the week in a dorm setting, similar to the traditional style dorms at OSU. Suffice to say, all of my
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We had all either grown up with a brother as a roommate or in a dorm type setting already, so we decided to live in the apartment style dorms where there is four bedrooms and two bathrooms. Privacy. I opened with my experiences before college so that I could show how my sense of personal space, living space, personal property and any other facet of human territoriality had already developed well before I started to experience the apartment life at OSU. By the time I had reached OSU, through six years of dorm life ay my high school, I had already developed these senses of human territoriality living away from home, in a new location, a new social environment and with humans I wasn’t related …show more content…
I never considered locking up or otherwise protecting stuff in my own bedroom. However, it was quickly drilled into my head that you cannot trust strangers around your stuff. I was not quick to abide by this assumption of others, but I have since learned. I have only ever had a couple of things stolen from me (only thing of value was an iPod touch) but now I lock the outside door to our apartment pretty much every time I leave, if no one else is in the apartment. However, I do not lock the door to my bedroom because I do trust my roommates – plus my window is one of two reachable from the outside so if anyone is breaking through the window I would be out of luck either way. It is a sad thing that you cannot trust everyday people, but it is a fact of life. Less so in our region of the country but that cannot be an excuse for
We had all either grown up with a brother as a roommate or in a dorm type setting already, so we decided to live in the apartment style dorms where there is four bedrooms and two bathrooms. Privacy. I opened with my experiences before college so that I could show how my sense of personal space, living space, personal property and any other facet of human territoriality had already developed well before I started to experience the apartment life at OSU. By the time I had reached OSU, through six years of dorm life ay my high school, I had already developed these senses of human territoriality living away from home, in a new location, a new social environment and with humans I wasn’t related …show more content…
I never considered locking up or otherwise protecting stuff in my own bedroom. However, it was quickly drilled into my head that you cannot trust strangers around your stuff. I was not quick to abide by this assumption of others, but I have since learned. I have only ever had a couple of things stolen from me (only thing of value was an iPod touch) but now I lock the outside door to our apartment pretty much every time I leave, if no one else is in the apartment. However, I do not lock the door to my bedroom because I do trust my roommates – plus my window is one of two reachable from the outside so if anyone is breaking through the window I would be out of luck either way. It is a sad thing that you cannot trust everyday people, but it is a fact of life. Less so in our region of the country but that cannot be an excuse for