When roommate assignments turn problematic
Getting a new roommate can be one of the most exciting things during the school year.
Everyone is ready to go back to school and meet new people, so why not get a new roommate? Well, there are quite a few good reasons to be wary of a roommate.
This year, I have noticed many students having problems with their roommates. Some of the problems are trivial things such as they just don’t have anything in common, but some problems are harder to handle. I’ve heard of people having their roommates purposely locking them out, while some roommates just happen to have different schedules that make them incompatible.
I was talking to a friend and he was telling me about a girl and her roommate. Apparently, her roommate hated her from the get-go. She would hide the girl’s food and tell her that she hadn’t deserved it.
One of my friends was stuck with terrible roommates. They would steal his stuff and eat all his food. They had no consideration for anyone. Another one of my friends ended up being matched with someone who had already died. Which was tragic, but how do you get paired with a dead guy?
Roommate pairs like that cause me to think, is it really worth going through the processes of applying for a new roommate? All people end up with are terrible matches. Most of the time, you could probably find a more compatible roommate on social media networks.
Maybe it’s just an issue with their matching techniques. I mean they use pretty much the same matching system as online dating sites like Match.com or eHarmony.
There are always horror stories of the online dating site matches. You have the person who pretends they’re someone they’re not, the person who turns out to be a cousin, the person who is really crazy that you think might be a serial killer.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some good roommate matches that come out of this. Some people are just good together, no matter what. Some of the people I know are best friends with their roommate, and that’s great.
It just seems like the majority of people this year aren’t working out with their roommates. It might just be that people are getting crazier and crazier or it might be how people have been brought up in this time period, but maybe it is just bad pairing. It might be possible to think of other alternatives to their matching database. What if they had things people could go to for a couple days and “try out” roommates? They could get to know someone and see if they like each other first.
Reach columnist Patricia Schopp at [email protected]
