As seniors are committing to colleges, their next step is finding a roommate.
Finding a roommate for college can be exciting. It may be one of your new best friends, or just someone that you live with while at school. Although it can be exciting to find your roommate, it also comes with some stress and pressure surrounding the decision.
There are many ways that incoming college students are going about finding roommates. Most commonly now, people DM each other on Instagram and get in contact that way. Colleges also run accounts where incoming students can submit photos of themselves so other incoming students can find people in their class. Certain apps like Bunky have been created to help with the roommate search as well. For some colleges, the roommate selection is completely random, and students don’t have the ability to directly pick their roommate.
Francesca Gionfriddo, a senior boarder from Glastonbury, Conn., who will be going to Colby College to play lacrosse, says that she does not have a say in who her roommate is.
“Colby College, where I’ll be headed next year, assigns you a random roommate based on nothing but one form that you will out, to my understanding,” she said. “It just asks if you’re a morning person, if you keep your room really clean, if you sleep with a noise maker, things like that, and they’ll pare you with someone who has similar preferences. I will also be a student athlete there- its 50/50 if you get paired with another athlete. I don’t know who my roommate is until August.”
Many schools take this approach when it comes to first year roommates. According to The Ivy Institute, it states that schools ask questions like sleep habits, study environment, cleanliness , and social preferences for random roommates. Schools like Holy Cross, Middlebury, and Tufts have random roommate surveys,
On the other hand, there are many schools that allow students to choose who they would like to live with on campus.
Taylor Cunningham, a current freshman at University of Virginia, likes the fact that she was able to pick her own roommate and get in touch before the school year began.
“I have one roommate,” she said. “I found her through Instagram. UVA has an Instagram where you can post pictures of yourself and you can add a short description. We DMed initially, then facetimed, then decided we should be roommates.”
Having the ability to get in touch with your roommate early on can be important to get a better sense of who they are, according to some.
Although it was nice to be able to choose a roommate, Cunningham stated that the process took some time.
“Honestly, it took me a while, from February to May,” she said. “I talked to a lot of different girls on Instagram. Some you don’t vibe with, some already found other roommates. It’s definitely a long process.”
In the end, Cunningham is very happy with her roommate and is happy that she could choose her roommate instead of going in random.
Grace Magel, a freshman on the Endicott College Dance team, who had the ability to choose her roommates, had a slightly different experience than Cunningham with finding a roommate.
“I found my college roommates because I’m on a college dance team at my school, Endicott College,” she said. “I thought that it would be easiest to room with people on the dance team because we are running on similar schedules, and we have similar interests and stuff.”
“It didn’t take super long to find my roommates,” she added. “I committed to the team in March, and we decided to be roommates in the end of April. There’s nine freshman on the team, so we talked around and figured who would need roommates.”
Committing to college for athletics has an impact on who people room with. According to the Athletics page on Endicott College, approximately 19% of the undergraduate program are involved in college athletics. The students apart of the 19% may have it easier to find a roommate, given that they will have teammates that they can be with.
Although Magel has built in friends from the team that she is a part of, she thinks that it is important to make more connections beyond the team.
“It’s also important to branch out and have those connections outside of your dorm too,” she said.
Your roommate can be your new best friend, or someone that you just live with. Most importantly, students should be active making new friends and connections around school and the dorm.
