Open Days 2009

We’re all here to learn about accommodation. I’m going to give you a little talk about the accommodation options around the Bundoora area. I’ll discuss both on campus and off campus accommodation. One thing that’s very important to consider when you first start at university is your accommodation options because a stable living environment will lead to a stable study environment. And without a stable environment, you’re pushing uphill with the university course.

So, I’ll give you a brief overview of the accommodation, the types of accommodation, and then I’ll hand over to Dai Harris who is sitting down the front here, and he’ll give you a rundown on the academic programs and all the good stuff that the colleges here at La Trobe offer.

And then when Dai's finished his talk, we’ll open it up to question time and we’ll have, hopefully, a group of students from the colleges who’ll come here to answer your specific questions about any college.

So, finding accommodation in Bundoora. It’s pretty easy, really. You’ve got the real estate agents. There’s plenty of them. And you’ll find their ads in the local papers. The local paper around here is called the Leader, or Saturday’s Age, the real estate section. Those people that have the Internet connected to the home which is most people, if you go to sites like domain.com, you can search on that for accommodation in the area.

A lot of landlords don’t list their properties through estate agents. They list them privately. Again, you’ll find them in both types of newspapers but the La Trobe University accommodation services offers a database where we list private accommodation. So you can log on to the web page through the accommodation page and look at the accommodation there.

One thing we say with that accommodation is it’s not vetted by the university. It’s a service we offer to the prospective students of La Trobe to help them find accommodation. But at this stage, we don’t go out and vet that accommodation. So make sure that before you sign anything, go and have a look at that accommodation to make sure it does suite your standards.

The other type of accommodation that we have is home stay. Now, home stay is really the empty nest as you probably all heard of that term, that’s where people have sons and daughters and they leave home and they’ve got an empty room. And for either reasons of wanting company, young company around the house or for wanting extra money, they’ll rent out that bedroom.

Now, again, the best place to find home stay is through our accommodation database. The types of accommodation that are offered around here, most students take one or two bedroom flats and the prices are up there; $175 for one bedroom. Two bedrooms start at $220, houses start at about $250 and the three bedrooms will finish up at about $350. Bond on all of those is typically one month’s rent.

Now, they are estimated rentals for accommodation that would suit a student. They are not executive type of accommodation although you might think of when you look at those rental rates. For shared housing, it’s pretty self-explanatory. When people share a house, you’ll have a share of the rentals depending on what the type of house or flat is, it will range from about $90 to $110 a week. And you’ll have, of course, your share of gas and electricity, your share of the bond.

Home stay accommodation usually ranges with meals, $160 to $190 a week and with room only. That starts quite often at $80 to $100 a week. With those types of accommodation with home stay, the bond is usually two weeks’ rent. There are a few things to consider when you’re renting accommodation outside or anywhere is don’t sign a lease without first inspecting the property.

That’s one thing we stress with people because if you look at the picture in the newspaper or on the web or something like that and you ring the landlord, and they will tell you how fantastic the property is, well, they’re probably not lying because maybe in their eyes, it is fantastic. But when you actually go there, it may not suit your standards because everybody has different standards.

So we always say, “Go and have a look at the property before signing any lease.” And the other is if you join any shared household, don’t join that household without meeting the other sharers because they are the people that you’re going to have to live with, and if you don’t get on with them, well, it’s a little bit too late after you’ve sign the lease. So make sure that you meet everybody that you’re going to live with over the time.

The must-do’s. As I said before, you must inspect the property and you must ask questions. Ask as many questions as you can but one of the questions you must ask is, “What happens if I break the lease?” Now, this is important because it will probably be or more than likely be a financial cost and it could happen through ill health. You might drop out of university or something like that so you’ll want to know what you’re up for in the first place.

And check that there’s transport to the university because although you might see a bus route outside, it might not go directly to the university. You might have to change buses which can be very frustrating if they don’t link up. And verify all details. Don’t just assume that what you see is what you’re going to get.

If you’re going along to rent a house, a shared house or something like that, and you walk in and they show you the master bedroom with the en suite, say to them, “Is this the room I’m going to get?” Because you might sign the lease and then when you get there, you’ll find you got the little room at the back near the toilet and you won’t be very happy.

Also find out about car parking. Although there maybe car parking on site, there might be four people there with cars, whatever, and you might have to park out on the streets. So don’t just assume that you got on site parking. And things, like, ask is it a smoking or a non-smoking household, whether you can have pets and things like that.

One thing you’ve got to consider when you’re establishing a flat or a house is the extra cost of fitting it out. We’ve done a little table here and we reckon that it’s going to cost a minimum of $1800 to fit out a house or a flat for one person, that is. Also, you’ll have to bring other items from home.

There’s pillows, sheets, doonas, blankets, and all those things listed there. There’s the odds and sods of dishwashing utensils. Now, all those things cost money and they’ve got a way to be bought or brought from home one or the other. But they are things that you’ve got to have.

Now, of course, to save all that problems, you can live on campus. And, of course, that’s what we’re recommending you do. Bundoora is a fantastic campus. You can see it from the picture there. It’s really park-like. It’s serene. And it’s a great living environment.

So what we say is living on campus is really the best choice. When you live on campus, you join a dynamic and caring community. You have a choice of three colleges on campus here. You got Menzies and Chisholm. Both of those are self-catered colleges. That means that they’ve got kitchens in them where when you come home from university, you cook your own meals and that sort of thing, whereas Glenn is fully-catered. Glenn is a little bit like being at home. You get up in the morning, mom’s cooked the breakfast or whatever, and it’s there. You come home from the evening, and mom’s cooked the dinner, it’s there.

We also have 90 self-contained flats they call the Barnsway in the Waterdale Road. Apartments. They are really a good place to stay but we don’t recommend them for first year students because they’re more of a landlord-tenant relationship. The reason they were formed was so that people could rent on landlord-tenant relationship but knowing that the landlord was an honest landlord because the landlord is La Trobe University.

So, the only time I would recommend the first year students taking those is if you have your brother and sister or something like that coming down for a first year and you want to live together in a flat and have a room for mom and dad to stay when they come down for the weekend. But other than that, we would recommend you go to a college.

We’ve also got Graduate House and the University Lodge and they have fantastic places to stay. But, again, there’s a minimum age of 22 years old for both of those properties. And, again, we say in your later years, go to Graduate House at the University Lodge, but in your first years, go to the colleges because they don’t have the mentoring programs, they don’t have the academic assistance, and they probably just don’t have much fun as you would have in a college.

Rough guides to costs for next year; just listed them here. These aren’t set in stone but they’re what we think the rentals are going to be. So Menzies is $208, Chisholm is $163, and Glenn is $268. That might sound a lot of money but remember, you get 14 meals per week with Glenn, which is breakfast, a choice of continental hot or cooked meal; dinner, you get a choice of five main courses which is pretty good; and Sunday, you have a Sunday brunch. So that all adds up to 14 meals per week.

There are a lot of benefits that aren’t obvious to living on campus. I’ll list them here. There is 24 hours emergency maintenance access and there’s prompt attention to maintenance request. We have a team of maintenance staff at the university and hundreds and hundreds of contract tradesman that we have coming in on a daily and monthly basis to fix things up. So there’s never any problems with maintenance

If you’re living off campus, of course, and you want something fixed, then you’ve got to ring the state agent, who ring the landlord, who ring the tradesman, and you might eventually get it fixed. You don’t have that problem with La Trobe. There’s direct access to the landlord. The division of residential services is in Menzies College, so all you have to do is walk downstairs and talk to somebody in the office there.

You’re in a very secure living environment. It’s basically enclosed although it hasn’t got a fence around it. It’s an enclosed campus and it’s also very secure. It’s multicultural and discrimination-free which is a fantastic thing in these days. And you have access to the university courtesy bus which is great because if you go into the city at night time or something like that and you get off the tram, all you have to do is ring the security courtesy bus and they’ll come and meet you at the Bundoora tram stop and drop you off at the college door.

It’s a guaranteed standard of accommodation. When you leave here, I hope some of you might have already had a tour. If you don’t have a tour of the colleges and see the standard, ‘what you see is what you’ll get’. The rental right is also a guarantee for twelve months. We won’t spring any six month’s rent reviews on you or anything like that and you have convenient access to the university sporting facilities.

One very important thing is that you’re within walking distance to the library on campus. No college is more than a five or seven-minute walk away from the library. And I’ve got a friend that works in the library and she was saying that at night time, the library is open till 10:00 or 10:30, I’m not sure which but she said that nearly all college students that utilize the library. And that makes sense because it’s only, as I said, five minutes away from the college door.

And if you’re really lazy or if it’s raining cats-and-dogs, again, you can ring up the campus security bus and it will come and pick you up at the library and drive you just across the moat for two for half-a-minutes and drop you off at their door.

But one very important thing, of course, is that you are living in a university community environment. Campus security is monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All the colleges here have electronic key or card access for entry to the buildings so there’s no worries about intruders or anything like that. And the bedrooms are individually keyed with master keys that can’t be cut so you know you’re the only person who has a key for their room.

All colleges have a reception person at the front desk during working hours. And if you have a problem after working hours, you can call up your local RA. Each xollege has a number of RA’s on each floor and each town, each wing, so there’s stacks and stacks of people that are there for your assistance if you have a problem.

And if you’ve got a good car or whatever, there’s a risk for a small extra charge, a secure car compound where you can drive your car in, again, that works on electronic access so your car is parked securely. What you see if you came in the front gate, walk in the front gate because you can’t drive in, they’ll stop you and turn you back is the gate house, that’s the visible signs of La Trobe security.

But what you don’t see is in the bowels of the David Myers building, these guys that sit at monitors and they see what’s happening all around the campus with the cameras that we have mounted. And if they see a problem, they can radio the security guards who will be there in a few minutes in their vehicles.

There are quite a few facts about living on campus and one of them is that it is a transition to university life. And that’s because when you join the college, 50% roughly of the people that are in that college are first year students. And the rest have been there, done that. So there’s always somewhere that somebody next to you that’s got the same problems as you have, and there’s always somebody there that had the same problems but had solved them. So you’ve got no problems there.

It’s one of the best ways to become involved in a university community. And you live with other students with the same interests, goals, and needs as you’ve got. So, another fact is that students that live on campus have more frequent contact with faculty and other fellow students.

All the colleges hold faculty dinners where they invite the academics over to have dinner with them and there were talks and things like that. And it’s a fact that students who live on campus participate in more extracurricular activities. They also assume most leadership roles. We have residential assistant roles, we have mentoring roles, and a stack of other roles that students get involve in when they’re living on campus.

It’s also a fact, and it’s a worldwide fact. This is not only La Trobe, it’s every university in Australia and around the world, that if you live on campus, you are less likely to fail. Now, that’s really, really important because that’s what you're here for, to pass university. So if you are less likely to fail, live in colleges; one of the best ways to ensure that you’re going to get a pass. You are more likely to remain at university and graduate. There are less dropouts of people that live in colleges compared to people that live off campus or at home.