Categories: Dorm Life

Decorations That Every College Student Needs on Their Walls

When you’re in college the place you will probably be spending the most amount of time is your dorm room. Your room is the first thing you see when you wake up and the last thing you see before you go to sleep. You will be living there for many months and so it should feel like home. While your parents may have decided how to decorate your actual home, you have free reign in a dorm room. The best way to decorate is on the walls. When you enter your dorm room for the first time, those walls will be extremely bare. It is your job to make those walls not just any dorm room walls. Someone should be able to look at your wall decorations and know that they belong to you. There are a lot of things you can hang up to represent your personality. You should go with what speaks to you and your specific interests. Once all of your wall decorations are put up, the room will actually look like a person lives there. Your personality, your interests, and your identity are what add up to you, so represent those concepts on the walls of your new home.

1. String Lights

Wall decorations can help you achieve a certain aesthetic for your room. They can help make your room look pretty and brighten up the place, metaphorically and literally. String lights can help accomplish this goal. They can be strewn about your room’s wall any way you like. You can stretch them straight end to end, you can make them into shapes, and you can even put up multiple string lights at once. You can even get them in different colors. When the lights are on, it’ll give a subtle light for a pretty look. When you turn your lights off, the string lights will give your room a beautiful glow. It will be like living in your personal fairy land. You can get some strings on Amazon and they will tie your room together in a wonderful way.

2. Floating Shelves

While you mostly decorate walls for beauty reasons, they can also be decorated for practical reasons. Floating shelves can be placed on your walls to place anything you want. They can hold a decorative succulent, some small books, toys, speakers, and anything else you don’t want to keep away in a drawer. No need to bring a giant bookshelf to your college dorm, these shelves will be easy to pack while still being able to carry so much. To hang them up, you should buy some adhesive strips so that the shelves don’t ruin the wall. Then you hang up the shelves onto the strips, but be careful. Do extra research if necessary. Whether you want to put a decoration on your shelf or you want to put something useful on your shelf, the floating shelf will be a great addition to your wall and make your wall complex.

3. Entertainment Posters

Your dorm room should be an expression of your personality. It should express who you are and what you like. If you want to show your interests, a poster is a great way to do it. The possibilities are endless in terms of what piece of media you can get on a poster. Anything from Breaking Bad to Superbad to Bad Bunny. If it is displaying something or someone that you love, you should be able to put it in your room. Interests are a core part of a person’s personality, so there is no reason why they should not be hanging from your walls. Some colleges may have a poster fair at the beginning of the year where you can find these entertainment posters. If not, you can find them online at websites like AllPosters and TrendsInternational. A dorm room is your home, and it should represent you, so entertainment posters will show what makes you happy.

4. Funny Posters

It is your room, so you should have some fun with it. Smile when you look at your wall, because it makes you happy and because it makes you laugh. There are posters with puns, with jokes about food, with witty comments about drugs, and so much more. The posters may not reflect something you are particularly interested in or a specific hobby. They are a representation of your sense of humor. They make your room unique and fun. If you bring a friend over, you may not have posters of interests that you can’t bond over, but everyone loves a great joke. These posters will show the fun person that you are and they will make for a happy room.

5. Tapestries

The wall decorations should reflect your interests, but they should also try to make your walls as appealing as possible. That is where tapestries come in. Tapestries are large pieces of fabric with artsy intricate designs to hang up on a wall. They are wall decorations to add some color and beauty to your room. If you hang one up, it would make your room artsy and prettier. You can pick certain colors to create an aesthetic and certain designs that make you happy. A good tapestry can be found on Society6. They may not show your personality, but they will make your room feel more like a home and will help make your walls look beautiful.

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6. Flags

You should be able to represent who you are in your room. Take pride in who you are and where you came from. Your dorm will show the key parts of you, and a flag will represent that. Flags can represent many different things. You can put up your state flag, your county’s flag, or any other flag that represents your culture. There are also flags to represent your sexuality or gender identity to show pride in your identity. It’s your new home, you should be able to be loud and proud about who you are. Hanging a large flag in your room will let any visitors know right away a deep part of yourself.

7. Old Photos

You may be away from home, but that does not mean home should be away from you. Cherish your past and make sure it is still a part of you. Try to get copies of photos of you with your family and friends from home. This could be a photo booth picture, pictures from a roller coaster, polaroids, and any other print copy of a photo that you have. You can either tape these directly to your walls or hang up a string and attach the photos if you are afraid of taking them off the walls. If you ever get a feeling of being homesick, you can look at your wall decorations to be reminded of people. Make the great times from your past a part of your safe space so that you can still hold on to who you’ve known and loved.

8. New Photos

College is a brand new experience and a time to make new exciting memories. Therefore, you should document all of the moments that you can. Anytime a campus event has a photo booth, use it with your new besties. Anytime that you can get an actual copy of a photo is important because it can be cherished in your dorm room. It will show how much you are growing in college and all of the great times that you are having. If you are ever feeling stressed, you will be able to look at your wall decorations to think of the happy times that you are having at college. By the end of the year, there should be a plethora of happy times from campus on your walls. While it is great to remember the past, these new photos will show college you and how you are thriving in college.

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Rachel Rosenfield

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