First Year Experiences: The Roommate

So here's the first of my first year blog posts.

Clearly, they ordered Lemon Thai

One of the incoming first years mentioned her anxiety about having a roommate this coming year and I thought I would address it. Last year, I was definitely excited about having a roommate but it was a little nerve racking too. To put this into context, I've basically been an only child throughout middle school and high school, never went to boarding school and have never had to share a room with anyone before, except on family trips.

Throughout the course of this past year, I have seen a lot of varied roommate pairings. Some of these have worked, others have not. When it doesn't work out, the blame does not fall onto one person or the other. It is not solely one person's fault that something didn't work out, just that certain circumstances have made it impossible for them to live together.

The two most important things for successful roommate pairings(in my opinion) are as follows:

1) Sleep patterns: Do you go out and come back really late? Do you sleep really late on the weekends? Are you generally a morning person? Are you an evening person? Are you a light sleeper? Are you a heavy sleeper? You may not know the answer to these questions yet but it'll be something you'll figure out soon enough. Once you do, try to work out a policy for how to deal with potential differences. For example, in one roommate pairing I knew, if one roommate had to work for more than 20 minutes after the other roommate has gone to sleep, the working roommate would need to find another place outside of the room to work for the remainder of the evening.

2) Visitors: While you may enjoy having the freedom to have your romantic partner(or even just friends) over, this requires quite a bit of adjustment for your roommate, whether it's giving up the room, or having someone stay in the room overnight. It's something that should definitely be hammered out in the beginning of the school year, no matter how silly you feel doing it.

I think the most difficult part of dealing with roommates is open communication. There are a whole host of complications. People don't like hurting other peoples' feelings, they want to be best friends with their roommate but their roommate isn't feeling it so much. There are a lot of little things that you might need to talk about that you don't even realize you need to talk about because you've already dismissed them as too banal. I assure you, they are not.

So when you arrive on campus in August, try to keep an open mind. Be flexible and try to accomodate and compromise. This is your first act as an adult and while you might think this redundant, but your roommate at the most basic level just needs to be someone you can get along with well enough to live together peacefully. You'd be shocked at how much of a difference this can make in your overall experience here.