Moving to a new city can be an overwhelming experience for anyone, luckily Disney makes it a little easier by offering housing for their college and international program participants. You do not need to use their housing however, I knew a few people who found housing on their own. I personally knew I wanted to use Disney housing because it was easy and a great way to meet other people in the program. There are four different housing complexes that are available: Chatham Square, Patterson Court, Vista Way, and The Commons. My apartment was in Chatham Square and I had a good experience living there for the most part. The main issues we had was that our air conditioning system had to be fixed a few times during our time there and our kitchen space was very limited. That being said, I did not regret staying in that complex at all.
Now let's talk about roommates!! One thing to for sure expect with Disney housing is to have roommates, and most likely a lot of them. Every apartment complex is different of course, but most people had between 4-8 people in a apartment. My complex roomed eight people. I know that seems like a lot of people in one space, but the apartment we were in was spread out enough that it was doable. We had four bedrooms with two people to a room, two bathrooms that connected to two bedrooms, one guest bathroom, a large living room, and kitchen space. None of us felt too crowded in our space and we definitely had the ability to have personal space and alone time.
Many of you going into the program are probably confused as to find people to room with, I know I was at first! I did not personally know anyone doing the program, so I decided to join the Facebook group for my program and send out a post that I was looking for roommates. After talking to a few different girls, I found three other girls to live with. If you feel like being adventurous, you can always take a chance and just go with random roommates. Four of my roommates were random and I actually became really close to a couple of them!
I was pretty lucky in the fact that my roommates and I all got along with each other and we didn't have a ton of drama. That being said, I became extremely close with a couple of them and then only really saw the others around our apartment. With conflicting schedules and personality differences, it's hard to become super close with everyone in an eight person apartment. You should definitely expect to be friendly and comfortable with all your roommates, but I wouldn't expect to be best friends with all of them.
That's all for this blog post! Next post is going to be about your free time during your program. Till next time!
