I want to tell you all about my new apartment. This is a real NYC resident you’re talking to now, no more dorms, no more glowering CUNY security guards at the door. Just a little old building on a side street a few blocks from Central Park, and my name on the buzzer.

I’m sharing the place with two good friends of mine who I met in the dorms. We were all offered the worst, and most expensive Hunter housing this year, so we struck out on our own and vowed to find better. We ended up with this cute three-bedroom just big enough for us, and for the next year, it will be home.

My room is small and strangely shaped, it has five sides, like a house. At the moment, there are only two pieces of furniture in it — my grandmother’s old roll-top desk (also currently acting as my dresser) and my piano. My bed is not really a bed, it’s more of a mattress-on-the-floor-type situation, but that is temporary, don’t worry. It’s just that I didn’t realize what I needed was a loft bed until two weeks ago, so my bed is coming, it’s just still in the mail.

We’ve got a little living room and a kitchen tacked onto it, both of which my roommate Ashley has decorated with a mix of music posters and little plastic skeletons. She loves Halloween. My other roommate, Rosalie, has made the greatest contribution of all: her cat Tiffy. Tiffy is huge and fluffy, she sleeps by my head, and she’s beginning to walk around like she owns the place.

It took us an entire summer to get here. I remember sitting backstage at my job at the Shadowland this summer, killing time at rehearsals and scrolling through the Manhattan real estate listings, wondering what a commute from Harlem would be like, or whether we could squeeze ourselves into a Chinatown studio. Most of the apartments I saw would soon be gone, in contract by the end of

the week.

We had to act fast, and I’m glad we did. I hadn’t even seen this apartment in person when we signed the lease, but I put my trust in my roommates, in NYC there can be no hesitation. We ended up just half an hour from Hunter College, and the walk through the park is so nice I even did it twice in the rain. We are also right around the corner from Juilliard, there’s a jazz guitarist upstairs rehearsing right now. At night, there’s usually a whole band up there. I bet they hear me struggling through my Chopin pieces and wonder how on Earth I got in to a top-tier music school. Little do they know.

It feels triumphant, being here. Every aspect of the process was intimidating, so we call ourselves conquerors and we celebrate. That’s all we’d do if not for our classes. It’s so tempting to go off on our own and become absorbed in the city, but the fact is that I have essays to write. Ashley has statistics to puzzle through. Rosalie has readings to decipher. It’s the same old assignments, but with a new home base, hard won.