1. Your Desk

Yeah sure, your actual desk is right next to the bed (or in many situations, under it), but everyone knows sprawling out on your mattress surrounded simultaneously by your books and your pillows is a much better study environment. Who wants to hike down to the stuffy old library in the dead of December to prepare for finals when your bed is calling? Granted, we all know we just inevitably end up watching Netflix and falling asleep but hey, that happens in the library too, it’s just much less comfortable.

2. Your Couch

There is an extreme lack of couches in college. You never know how often you used to sit on your couch at home or how much you used to love it until now. Yes, there are communal couches and armchairs in common areas and lounges, but they are usually grimy and stained and, for some reason, there is always a wait for them. But, if you’re anything like me, you surpassed the need to wait for substandard couches like the common folk and have bought so many pillows for your bed that you can essentially manipulate it into a couch-like structure using physics and some creativity. It’s where you watch movies, where you chat with friends, where you nap. If you squint hard enough it looks a little bit like a chaise, and it’s certainly more comfortable than the cheap wooden chair you’ve been propped up in for the past six hours.

3. Movie Theater

Movie nights with friends and roommates are essential in college. Be it on a DVD player or the TV or Netflix on your eleven-inch laptop screen, college kids find ways to watch movies, most of which involve the whole squad piling onto your bed for some quality time. With the quintessential dorm room string lights on the wall and the single nauseating overhead LED off, a dorm makes for the perfect movie-viewing environment (if you can manage to tune out the girl who lives above you and her boyfriend).

4. Your Kitchen Table

I think every college student is guilty of it. You bring your cereal, your popcorn, Easy Mac, dining hall salad, Ramen, basically anything you had lying around while you were too lazy to go out and actually have a real meal, onto your bed. Whether it’s because your desk is too cluttered from all that homework or if you just can’t see the TV from the desk, the one flat surface in your dorm, and don’t want to miss the latest episode of The Bachelor, the bed usually offers a pretty good alternative to the kitchen table or counter back home.

5. Storage

Your bed. It’s where you throw your laundry instead of folding it, where you keep that one coat that doesn’t fit in the closet, etc. And again, if you are one of the lucky few with a lofted bed, the storage options beneath your bed are endless. It’s a space for drawers, bins, the mini fridge, your hamper, shoes, cleaning supplies, anything really. In college, there is not an inch of floor space to be wasted and you have to maximize on all of it in whatever creative ways you can think of.

6. An Escape

Whether it’s from your roommate, that annoying girl on the swim team who can’t seem to stop following you around, or simply your friends that you need a breather from, your bed offers the best option. When you need to hide from homework, people, and other responsibilities, hopping into bed, turning off the lights, and pulling the covers up over your face in the desperate hope that they will turn into Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak always seems to work- at least, for a little while.

7. The Hippest Up-and-Coming Date Night Venue

College kids are usually pressed for time, lazy, broke, or any combination of the three. You have no cash to spend on a fancy night out with the Cute Blonde Boy from room 216 and for some reason, another night chatting while sipping from communal dining hall cups just doesn’t really seem personal enough. You want to get to know Cute Blonde Boy outside of the line for the fries. If you're searching for love in college, there’s no better excuse for getting close than inviting the boy from down the hall into your dorm to hang out. Since it’s a dorm and your chair is currently acting as the home for that monstrous Econ textbook, you’ll both inevitably end up on the bed. Now, you have control here. Things could be as innocent as you want them to be. If you’re looking to heat things up quick, however, and don’t mind looking slightly awkward in a vain attempt to flirt, might I suggest the age old classic “reaching for the charger behind your head” move? Boys cannot resist when you climb over their bodies in desperate need for the outlet.

8. Personal Gym

While I may be too lazy to walk down to the gym, I still want to work out, don’t get me wrong. The motivation is there, just not enough of it. I like to disguise my exercise in daily activities so that I don’t realize I’m doing it. For example, use your ladder as your StairMaster. Bring your twenty-five-pound literature textbook up onto your bed instead of lifting weights. Instead of crunches, my favorite is the essential “lean your entire body dangerously over the side of your bed in an attempt to reach something on your desk that’s impossibly far away and try not to die by either falling off or letting the blood rush to your head for too long.” If you really want to get crazy and have a full body workout, try making the bed. Nothing burns quite as many calories as putting a fitted sheet on a lofted bed or trying to get the duvet back in the cover when you have approximately one cubic foot of floor space in the room. Really, what freshmen fifteen? I’ve never been in better shape.

9. Basically the NASA Control Room

At least, that’s how I like to imagine it when I’m sitting six feet in the air on my lofted bed, laptop in lap typing an essay, talking to my mom on the phone while also trying to watch the weather on TV to know how to dress while I walk to my impending doom, aka finals. When you’re plugged in, with notebooks and remotes and wires around you, you feel very busy and important, even though you really probably aren’t. You can order take-out from up there, online shop, plan your week, make demands of your roommate (“Will you please turn the lights out? Oh and hand me that water bottle. And actually can you plug this in for me, just while you’re down there?”) You’ve also found the perfect angle on which to watch that cute kid from the building next door out your window without him seeing you. It’s the command center, headquarters, nothing more important happens that what goes on in your bed (sleeping included).