Five Tips for Living with Your College Roommate
Nervous about living with a complete stranger for the first time? Never fear, these tips will steer you in the right direction.
For many incoming college students, living in the dorms will provide their first experience living in extremely close quarters with another human being. This is very exciting but can also be an unneeded source of anxiety. The transition to college is already difficult enough without having to worry about whether you will get along with your roommate for the school year! But never fear! Whether you picked your roommate ages ago or they were assigned to you randomly, here are some tips that will make things go as smoothly as possible.
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Talk to Them Before School Starts
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Lay Out Your Lifestyle and Be Prepared to Compromise
Most schools these days will provide you with the phone number or e-mail address of your roommate well in advance of the start of classes. Obviously you’re going to want to talk to them to figure out what you should bring to your room, but in addition to this, just make friendly conversation a few times throughout the summer. Check up on them, ask about their high school and summer job, and how excited they are to get to school. Move-in day can be stressful enough and it’s nice to already be friendly and somewhat comfortable with your roommate as soon as you arrive.
Being roommates is a lot like being in a long term relationship with someone – if you’re going to make it work, both of you will have to make sacrifices. My roommate in freshman year spent the summer as a landscaper and was accustomed to going to bed at 11PM, while I spent the summer lazing around my house and was used to going to bed at 4 in the morning. Inevitably, we both had to compromise. This doesn’t mean he had to start going to bed later and I had to start going to bed earlier, but it did mean we had to change our activities (ie. be more quiet) while the other was asleep and we laid this out on the first day which avoided a lot of conflict.
Another issue you might want to talk about is cleanliness. My roommate was somewhat of a neat freak and I couldn’t have cared less about the state of our rooms. For the first little bit, this led to a room that was pristine on his side and completely dishevelled on mine. We talked about it and learned to compromise; he would be more tolerant of my mess and I would do my best to clean my room more often.
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