Off-campus housing near Hunter College, sixteen minutes down the 6

The station is inside the campus

Hunter's main campus sits at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, and the 6 train stops directly beneath it — the station is called 68th Street–Hunter College, with entrances that open into the campus buildings themselves.

The practical consequence is that your commute has no outdoor segment at the campus end. In late January, on the Upper East Side, that is not a small thing. You come up the stairs and you are already in the building.

Seton Residence sits half a block off Lexington at East 40th, and the 6 runs the length of the avenue from Grand Central. Door to door is sixteen minutes.

What sixteen minutes actually buys

The obvious alternative is to live near campus. Plenty of Hunter students do, and the case for it is real — you cannot beat a walk.

What you trade for those sixteen minutes is the neighbourhood you spend the other twenty-two hours in. The blocks around 68th and Lexington are Upper East Side: quiet, residential, expensive, and a long way from most other things you will want on a Friday.

Midtown East at 40th is a different proposition. Grand Central is four minutes on foot, which puts five subway lines and Metro-North at the end of the street rather than one. So the campus commute lengthens by a quarter of an hour and every other journey in your week gets shorter.

The other reason people look off-campus

Hunter is a CUNY school and most of its students commute. Housing is not the centre of the offer the way it is at a residential university, so finding somewhere to live is a problem the student solves rather than one the institution solves.

Which puts you in the open Manhattan rental market, where the two things that break a student application are the lease term and the paperwork — twelve months against an academic year, and a guarantor requirement against a first-year graduate student's credit file.

Renting a room from a building removes the second entirely. There is no co-signer requirement here, no joint liability with other residents, and no broker fee.

Nine months, which is the shape of the year

The minimum stay is nine months. That is close enough to September-to-May that the commitment and the reason for it are the same length — the single strongest argument this building has for a student.

It is also the hard edge. A single semester or a summer session is below the floor, so if you need four months this is the wrong building and it is better to know now. For a full academic year it fits almost exactly.

Somewhere to work that is not your room

A desk comes with the room, and for a lot of coursework that is enough. The problem with a desk in the room you also sleep in shows up around week ten, not week one.

Downstairs there is a lounge, a courtyard and a communal kitchen, which is the building's answer to needing a change of chair without leaving the building. Nine minutes further on foot are Bryant Park and the New York Public Library, which is the answer when the building is not enough either.

The block itself helps. East 40th between Lexington and Third is residential on both sides — unusual this close to 42nd Street, and the reason the street is quiet at eleven at night.

What the year costs

Rent is billed weekly. Electricity, gas, heat, water, sewer, trash, air conditioning, Wi-Fi and weekly housekeeping are all inside the rate — no separate accounts, no deposit to a utility company, no internet contract in your name.

• Deluxe Room — $525 a week, shared bathroom, full bed
• Studio Basic — $650 a week, en-suite, queen bed
• King Studio — $745 a week, en-suite, largest room, shareable as a twin

The one thing to settle before you enquire

There is no stove or oven in any room. Rooms have a mini-fridge, a microwave and a kettle; real cooking happens in the communal kitchen downstairs.

Over nine months that is either a fair trade or a daily irritation, and which one it is depends entirely on how you eat. Worth deciding on a page rather than at a door.