With college in full swing, students are starting to get the hang of sharing a space with their roommate. Or they are quickly learning that the person they met on Instagram isn’t how they actually seemed online. For some, roommates make or break the college experience; most people don’t want to be paired with someone who they can’t even be friends with.
Some first-year students at Butler find their roommate on an unaffiliated Instagram page designed to introduce prospective students to each other. This is how I found the best roommate and lifelong friend last year.
This process is essentially social media speed dating, but instead of finding a relationship, it’s someone you are going to be living with for the whole academic year.
To attain this, the most vital hack I can offer for having a good experience with your roommate is to communicate. If communication isn’t occurring, there is no room to share feelings, thoughts, unresolved tensions or preferences.
Some students decide to room with a stranger, while others decide to room with their best friend. This choice is risky because while you may generally get along with your friend, sharing a living space is completely different.
At first, everything may seem fine; however, most of the time tensions arise as you and your roommate adjust to the new living environment and your differences are amplified. This usually shows up in cleanliness, bedtime habits or even poor communication.
For me, I wanted my roommate to be a friend in college. I valued having a roommate I wanted to come home to at the end of the night.
Nora Sableski, a junior theater and arts administration major, talked about best friends living together from her experience as a Resident Assistant in Residential College.
“Being roommates is just about finding where [or who] they best fit, and sometimes where they initially are assigned just doesn’t fit,” Sableski said. “Even if they are best friends before they come to school, we’ve experienced that a lot.”
Being a good roommate is adhering to the others’ needs. It is not all about you and your comfort. Try to look at your shared space from your roommate’s perspective and ask yourself, “would they find this messy?” “Do they care if I stay out until 1:00 a.m.?” “Is it annoying that I talk loudly on the phone every single night?”
Honestly, just use common sense and start being a better person!
Mallory Leach, a sophomore neuroscience and psychology major, spoke about her first-year roommate experience.
“I’m a very type A person, and she was a very type B person, and we kind of had a lack of communication when it came to what we expected as far as cleaning our room,” Leach said. “I definitely didn’t bring people to my room as much as I wanted to … It helped me to get out and meet new people because I never wanted to be in my room that much.”
Conflicts can be overcome; however, it all comes down to good communication. Yes, in some cases it is better to coexist than to be best friends, but from this perspective, some may struggle to get the most out of their first-year college experience.
Talk to each other. Once you communicate, you have a better chance of actually restoring or creating a friendship. You don’t have to be best friends, but you do have to learn how to live civilly together.
This generation is so avoidant, especially when it comes to conflicts. Be confident; most of the time, confronting someone is better than ignoring them completely.
My first friend in college was my roommate. We learned very quickly how to adapt to each other’s needs; we joked and we were both part of the same friend group. Being an out-of-state student, I needed the comfort of knowing that when I came back to my dorm, I would have a safe place to be myself.
I decided to interview my own roommate to reminisce about our time as first-year roommates. Without this support system, I would not be as happy in college as I am now, which tells me how much of an impact my roommate had on me.
Sophomore strategic communication major Briana Kirchhoff talked about her first year of college at Butler and how being roommates helped our friendship.
“If I had a bad roommate experience, I probably would have been a lot less outgoing, and a lot more angry all the time,” Kirchhoff said. “Being able to have a good roommate experience meant that I could go back to my room and be excited to see the person that I’m living with.”
When conflicts developed between my roommate and I, we communicated. When we both stayed in on a random Saturday night, we had each other to watch movies, YouTube or just talk with.
The downside to having an amazing roommate is that when sophomore year comes and you can’t share a space with them anymore, you realize just how good you had it.
My advice to students learning how to live in a space with a person for the first time is to make the most of it. Your roommate could be a built-in friend and the person that you should be able to depend on and make sure you both ‘match each other’s freaks.’