It doesn't matter if you are walking down the hall to the bathroom for a quick shower or leaving town for the weekend.
Lock your door.
Whether it's five minutes or five days, an unlocked residence hall room is an invitation for people to take a sneak peek around your room for anything that would sell well on eBay. As the crime statistics released this weekend show, reports of burglary in Ball State University's residence halls increased from 14 incidents in 2005 to 40 in 2006. Students need to take more precautions to protect themselves from being the next victim of criminally minded neighbors, hall visitors or even football players like the two who took laptops last fall.
Many college students bring thousands of dollars in technological equipment - including phones, computers, music players - to school each year and put it in their rooms. Then they wander around the residence halls with the false assumption their belongings are safe because they had to swipe an ID card to get into the hall. But hundreds of students can enter the building with a quick swipe of an ID, or by following a resident in.
You can't know every person in your hall. This isn't a small town where it's safe to leave your door open all day. If that's your mindset, change it. Don't blindly trust anyone.
By no means are we saying don't prop your door open when you are in the room so people can stop by and say hi. That's part of the fun of residence hall life. But if you aren't in there, you don't know who could be. A short walk to the bathroom could turn into an hour-long visit on a friend's couch. That's hard to predict.
So skip trying to forsee the future and guessing how long your room will be left open and unprotected. When you shut the door, before you head out, insert the key in the lock and turn it. Tug the handle, just to be safe. Because then your belongings will be.
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