LPT: Not allowed to have a router at college? Don't "hide" your SSID. Change it to something innocent like "HP Inkjet 5530 Series"
Source: worked for me for 4 years at a school where IT is in and out all the time messing with our network infrastructure
Most Colleges won't let you have your own router for your Dorm room, for example. But say you'd like to keep your Chromecast off the public WiFi network, or you want your phone to be connected to the same network as your desktop PC so you could connect to it remotely (This was my situation).
Even if you were to disable SSID broadcasting on your router, a signal is still being emitted. So, instead of trying to cover it up and looking suspicious, why not hide in plain sight?
Many things these days come with some sort of wi-fi direct feature, whether it's a printer or a smart home hub that broadcasts an SSID. Since these things usually are not connected to a network themselves when they are in wi-fi direct mode, they aren't seen as a threat by IT (from what it seems, anyway). Set your SSID to resemble one of these devices that would plausibly be in wi-fi direct mode all the time (printer is a good example) to avert suspicion. You can set a password too, since most printers will let you do that as well.
Story time
The first week I was at school the IT department was finishing up installing new access points in the dorms where I was staying. I had brought my own router from home because I was afraid of my Google Chromecast being bombarded with porn, or worse
I set the router up, knowing full well I wasn't supposed to, but I wasn't going to let anyone else on the router, so I wasn't concerned with getting in any legal trouble or anything from un-approved access to the school network. I was smart enough, I thought, to disable the SSID, so nobody else could see the network from their phone settings. Little did I know that windows laptops display hidden networks, and there are network scanner apps that show unnamed WiFi hotspots.
Well, my IT department remotely disabled the Ethernet ports in my room, so to get them re-activated I had to go to the IT office and talk to someone in charge. I apologized and made up something about thinking it we a switch that my dad had given me for my computer so I could play lan with my friends, playing dumb that maybe he had set it up before. Maybe the story was Overkill, but I did not want a computer policy violation on my record at college that quickly in my career there. (multiple strikes can lead to recover network access)
When I got back to my room that afternoon I had a mission but no idea how to accomplish it. For a while, probably close to a month, I just forgot about it and used my Chromecast innocently among a sea of others. My friends pranked me a few times, but other than that it actually wasn't as common an issue as I thought, to have people randomly cast things to your Chromecast in college. What I ended up finding though, was that I needed my phone to connect to the same network as my computer, which I built without a WiFi adapter, so that I could control a set of lights that was connected to it from my phone.
It was at this point that I thought of the printer idea. They sweep for unnamed networks and other WiFi networks, but they never asked me about my printer that was displaying an SSID. So I turned off the printer SSID, and set up the router again, this time making sure to name it the same name as the printer.
To this day, I don't know if they can see a list of devices connected from their office, but now that I'm about to graduate, they've not sent me a thing yet saying to stop, or remotely disabled my Ethernet again. So in my mind, it worked flawlessly. Maybe it'll work for you too!
