How the College Roommate Selection Process Works

How does the college roommate selection process work?

I answered an ad to share a house trailer in a park not far from campus. The owner was married to a patriotic sort who was in Korea beginning his lifetime army career. She was a neat freak who played the housewife role even though hubby was gone. She liked to watch the Nixon hearings in the afternoons just to root for him. She was an unsophisticated woman from a small Southern town. I am sure she secretly thought of me as a "dirty hippie" as I referred to her in my mind as "The Hillbilly". She liked country music and thought it was conducive to studying. She drank beer morning, noon and night but drinking didn't seem to improve her temperament.

We two opposites began our feckless roommate experiment by drinking a few beers while she told me repeatedly how great it was going to be that such total opposites could live together.

That was before she instantly cut off our would-be amiable arrangement by calling the campus police to come and evict me and right this minute. It was hot and raining, but it wasn't coming in through the windows. She came home to find me and my friends partying in her mawkish fake red satin-like flecked wallpapered living room with all windows open. I was out that night.

I tell you this story, and spare you several similar roommate horror stories, by way of introducing my answer to the college roommate selection process that can leave you feeling like you met a blind date for coffee and didn't finish the cup before you knew what a disastrous mistake it would be to go out with him. Only in the college roommate selection process you date steadily for a year after that meeting.

Every college/university employs its own process for this matching, whether it's just "smoking or non-", random selection, using the results of the Myers Briggs personality profile or hiring outside experts for the job. There is no one "roommate selection process". It all rides on what school you choose to attend. So my modest proposal is to save yourself from possibly spending a year living at the library and never using the dorm you should find a school whose ideas about the match-up are similar to your your own.

Food for thought: The devil you know or the devil you don't? Most colleges are amenable to requesting someone as your roommate if they can work it out with housing. Now who do you choose? That "friend" from high school you just ran into at the library to whom you barely spoke for all four years? Someone you've met in a bar in the two weeks you've been on campus?
A boyfriend/girlfriend to live in a really coed dorm for couples until you break up because you came home and found him in bed with the suite-mate? Then it's back to playing Russian Roulette at the Housing Office.

And you need to be asking yourself this: Do you believe that first marriages have a 50 percent divorce rate because the first time we marry we pick someone like ourselves, forgetting that we hate ourselves? The second marriage seems frequently based on opposites attracting, but opposites who fulfill practical concerns like having a great deal of money or being 30 years younger than you.

So you ask your friend from high school only to discover that she understands this to mean its Providence and you are her new roommate and now best friend with whom she expects to share all meals, outings, and walks to classes. No. Take the total stranger who forgot to mention that she is accustomed to sleeping in nothing but her gym shoes and a brown wool hat on a bed that never sees a sheet. On the plus side, she did say she was neat. She just didn't tell you that she didn't own anything and had no possessions with which to make a mess. So she borrows extensively from everything you own.

Or you can just let the university match you up with someone based on a series of two or three questions about sleeping hours and hygiene. Remember you will be barricaded for a year with whoever this stranger turns out to be, and you will be sharing a 15' X 15' bunker done up in pastel-painted bricks. How could you know that bathing or showering are both against her religious beliefs?

Okay, again I say, so what if a university doesn't have a program in what you had planned to major in and maintains a 8 o'clock curfew. The important thing for you to know is do they do roommate selection by reading everything in your file including your admission essay, talk to your friends, family and high school teachers; do astrological compatibility chart comparison; and hook you each up to a lie detector for questions like, "Do you borrow things without asking?"

Does the university, like Emory, U. of Washington, U. of Utah, U. of Kentucky and George State U, use computer software programs similar to that used for computer love match-ups? Many people swear by WebRoomz, the software company's name. Just keep in mind that people lie, and that goes for information you find on FaceBook or MySpace too.

Does your chosen university use a list of adjectives; e.g., shy, social, religious to match from, as does Lebanon Valley College in Annville, PA. Ask yourself if this is adequate protection against the roommate who has just come from seven roommate situations in one month that didn't "click".

Do you like the idea of every freshman taking the Myers-Briggs personality profile for match-ups like Davidson College, NC and many others do?

Right now a popular form of selection is having very good stay-together statistics. It is the online selection system that works on the same principles as computer dating. Students use screen names to hide their identities and post profiles detailing personality traits, work habits, music and food preferences and whether or not that plan to "do everything" with their roommate or "lead separate but compatible lives". They then work up to e-mailing and eventually phoning.

Another method that seems to be working well is letting the Housing Office collect lifestyle surveys and then let you look at them. Your fate is in their own hands and you might need to feel that bit of control. After Arizona State University used the survey method, three times as many students requested housing for the following year.

If you do choose a college or university that uses a roommate selection process you can get behind, and you still find yourself stuck with a snake handler who wears your clothes without asking and then tosses them on the floor, there are things you can do. Bring the problem to the resident adviser or dorm coordinator. Sit down together, talk and try to work things out. It's good practice for your future major long-term relationship in a marriage or partnership.

Or you could just pick up and transfer to another school with the hopes that the next one will have a foolproof system.