By Raena Doty
Arts & Features Editor
For resident students, it can be hard to live without their beloved pets for the first time - but Autumn Ray, a sophomore studio art major, was lucky enough to be able to bring her fish with her to her second year on campus.
Her fish, a betta named Angelcake, lives in a 10-gallon tank in the corner of her room, one facet of her “plant-y and weird” aesthetic, as she described it.
She said having a fish on campus helps her keep on task when she’s managing her schedule.
“It helps me organize my tasks and do everything that I need to do. So I’ll feed the fish and I’ll be like, ‘OK, I fed the fish, now it’s onto my other routines,’” she said.
Ray said Angelcake is not her first betta fish, and both of her fish before him have been named after food - Cheese and Mustard - and although a friend named Angelcake for her, they stuck with the theme of food.
Aside from Angelcake, though, Ray is missing a lot of members of her family - including her three sisters.
She said when living with three sisters “you never have anything that’s your own. And then you move out and you’re like, ‘Holy crap, I can’t just go ask my sister for an iron.’ I have to go buy my own so I can use it.”
When she first moved to FSU, she missed some of the energy of having her sisters around, she added.
“I would just sit in my room my first semester and have videos on in the background because I was just not used to that level of quiet. There was always noise in the house, but now there’s nothing in my dorm, so I’ll always have something on to keep me from going insane,” she said.
Still, she said there was one thing she likes above all else about living in the dorms - “privacy.”
To anyone who doesn’t know what to expect about living in a dorm, Ray said, “It’s a lot of fun,” but it also comes with a lot of responsibility.
“You’ll have your freedom, but you’ll have your own responsibility - to keep your room clean, to do your laundry - because no one’s there to remind you to do it,” she said.
Ray said having a room with lots of different decorations, with shelves and rearranged furniture and a fish, can be a lot of work to keep up on, but she chose to have many decorations intentionally.
She added in her freshman year she tried to have minimal decorations aside from her own drawings.
This year, though, she wanted to have more of her belongings in her room, even if that makes it harder to clean.
“I feel more at home,” she said.