By Laura Finaldi, News Staff

Filling out paperwork. Paying broker fees. Setting a price range for rent and utilities. Wondering if utilities are included in rent. Weighing walking distances to campus and public transportation.

The list goes on and on. So far on, in fact, that it’s easy to lose track of  things while searching for an apartment for the first time.

So starting in this month, Off Campus Student Services (OCSS), located at 226 Curry Student Center, will hold a series of workshops for students who are considering the move off-campus.

“We really want to be an advocate for students to ask questions before they sign the lease, rather than after the fact,” said OCSS Community Ambassador Chris Geddes, a junior economics major and Mission Hill resident of two years. “We outline the questions students should be asking before they sign anything.”

The preliminary workshop for students looking to move off-campus was called “Know Before You Go.” Its purpose was to introduce students to terms they may have been unfamiliar with – like “broker fee” and “subletter” – and also teach them how to deal with realtors and landlords. These workshops are over as of Tuesday, but all of the information provided can be picked up at the office.

Kelsey Roberson, Jennifer Plave and Charissa Luthman, all middlers who live together in West Village A, were at Tuesday’s workshop. The students are considering moving off-campus in the fall.

“We kind of needed to know all the stuff they said they were going to go over, so we hadn’t started too much [searching] yet,” Plave, a dual psychology and education major, said. “We looked at the [OCSS listings] website, and it was a little more daunting without this information, so now we can go back and look at it with this info.”

At “Know Before You Go,” senior ambassadors Ashley Caron, a psychology major and Kyle Kennedy, a senior psychology and criminal justice major teamed up with OCSS Director Gail Olyha advising students. They told the apartment hunters at the meeting to start the search early, figure out roommates and  and to understand their rights when it comes to dealing with realtors.

The office has nine community ambassadors, including Geddes, who can help students with the apartment hunt. Students can search for places to live by price range, location and number of bedrooms and bathrooms on the office’s website. Off-campus students with open rooms in their apartments can post sublet announcements as well.

Since its inception five years ago, OCSS has had a consistent clientele of freshmen looking to leave campus the following year. But a new policy that took effect when this year’s freshman class arrived in September is likely to change this, Geddes said.

Starting with the current freshman class, all sophomore students are required to live on campus as well. Since traffic into OCSS has been made up of mostly freshmen looking to move off-campus after an already-mandatory year of living in residence halls, Geddes said he is expecting things will be different from now on.

“Your sophomore year, you’re between the ages of 19 and 21, so you’re probably going to more house parties,” Geddes said. “As soon as [students] are 21, house parties stop, bars start. The middler, junior, senior class accounts for a far less percentage of our visitors than the sophomore class.”

Geddes said one of the reasons the university wants younger students to remain on campus is to create better relationships with surrounding communities. To help this cause, OCSS periodically holds off-campus community service events, including the Mission Hill Breakfast Club, a program in which a group of Northeastern students who are Mission Hill residents meets up on a Saturday morning, performs an hour of community service and gets a free breakfast compliments of OCSS. The club will meet five times this semester on March 11, 18 and 25 and April 8 and 15. A similar program is in the works for the Fenway neighborhood.

“[The Breakfast Clubs are] a fun way to do some community service for people who live [in the area] already,” Geddes said.

As for finding the right apartment, Geddes said, students should err on the side of common sense.

“If it feels sketchy, it probably is,” Geddes said.