As a soon to be sophomore in college, one of the exciting things that comes with the upcoming school year is picking where and who you want to live with. When selecting housing, no one really tells you what to expect.

Here are four things I believe every college student should know when applying for college housing:

1. The process can be a lot longer than expected.

For a lot of college students I've heard the process to be different, but also long. A lot of students are given numbers or a time and day when they are allowed to choose their choice of where they would like to live. From personal experience, applying for housing was a longer process than I expected. I had to wait for things like a housing deposit to process which took 24-hours for it to be finalized. I had to wait for those to clear before I could even look at my housing options. Then I was a given a time slot which was my designated time for when I would be able to pick my housing area and room. This seemed like a long process just to pick where I wanted to live the upcoming year.

2. Always have a back-up plan.

Whether you’re at a big or small college, some living areas are more popular and will fill up faster. Because of this, it leaves the underclassman, mainly sophomores, with less-popular areas that no one wanted, or are far away from the main campus. Be sure to start the application process sooner rather than later. If your housing application opens in the middle of March don't wait until a couple weeks before the application closes to start it. If you do wait until the last minute, more than likely you're going to be stuck in a living area you didn't want.

3. Living with certain people isn’t always set in stone.

Many students are always set on living with one or two of their friends, but there’s a chance it won’t happen. But some students' potential roommates end up changing their minds at the last minute on who they want to live with, or plan to live with certain amount of people and their original plans fall through, leaving those students looking for roommates at the last minute. For me, I was really excited to just live with one of my best friends. But because certain living areas are so popular, the housing we wanted was already taken, which left us scrambling to find two more possible roommates, who we didn’t really know. All of this caused a great amount of unwanted stress.

4. Always keep an open mind.

Many college students' housing doesn’t go the way they planned. The best thing to do when you're in that situation is to keep an open mind. I know your housing situation may not seem ideal right now, but everything happens for a reason. The random people that you end up living with could end up becoming some of your closest friends.