Living with Strangers Prepares You for Nigerian Work Culture

You want to pick your roommate ke? Have you even balloted successfully first? In campus housing, most students don’t get to pick. The only exception is if your parent is the Vice Chancellor.

The same way you do not get to pick your roommates, you also do not get to pick your work colleagues.

We’ve talked before about the different kind of things you'll encounter in a student housing here https://www.sophialiving.org/post/a-year-in-student-housing-the-good-the-bad-and-the-hilarious and also on the art of roomate-ing https://www.sophialiving.org/post/the-art-of-roommate-ing-surviving-and-thriving-in-shared-spaces

Now it’s time to connect the dots: how all those hostel survival skills prepares you for the Nigerian work culture.

Roommate Lessons = Workplace Lessons

The loud one

Stay long enough in student housing and you’ll meet them. The one who shouts during calls, plays music without headphones, or just doesn’t understand volume control. Call it low emotional intelligence or pure tone-deafness.

In the office, that same energy shows up in colleagues who don’t respect boundaries.

The always-borrowing one

There’s always that roommate who owns nothing. Today it’s salt, tomorrow bathing soap, next week your Sunday shoe. And guess what, they never return whatever they borrow.

At work, this spirit graduates into the colleague who borrows staplers, chargers, even ideas. All gone without trace.

The overly neat one

Some roommates act like they’re running a lab. Their side of the room is spotless, but it doesn’t end there. They want your side spotless too, on their own terms.

That behavior has a twin in the workplace: the boss who micromanages everyone.

The ghost roommate

This one is never around. You only know they exist because their things are in the room. God forbid you actually catch them.

In the office, this is the absentee colleague. Always with one excuse or the other, but somehow still on payroll.

Conflict Management

Every hostel teaches you one compulsory course: How to Fight Without Fighting 101. Sometimes you argue over who left the door open for mosquitoes, and sometimes it’s just plain “why is your bucket in my space?” The truth is, you won’t survive without learning when to confront, when to negotiate, and when to just mind your business.

In the office, it’s the same story. You’ll meet loud, sneaky, or ghost colleagues, and you can’t pack out. You have to figure out how to coexist without losing your mind, or your job.

Hidden Advantage

The part nobody tells you is that hostel wahala is free training. That patience you built when your roommate borrowed your shoe and returned it broken? That’s resilience. That strategy you used to stop your neat freak roommate from reporting you to the porter? That’s negotiation. Even the art of ignoring loud calls at 2 a.m.? That’s focus.

So when hostel life feels unbearable, just know it’s secretly preparing you for Nigerian work culture. Today’s annoying roommate is tomorrow’s survival manual.