With the end of the school year fast approaching, many seniors have already been accepted to a university and now face the new and daunting obstacle of finding a college roommate.
“The hardest part is putting yourself out there, because these people are going to live in the same room as you, and you want to find someone who you can spend a lot of time with,” said Alexis Rolka, a graduating senior who will be attending Shaw University in the fall.
Today, social media has become an integral part of the roommate-finding process, and many students have turned to various social media platforms to find roommates that aren’t so random.
“I am currently following Instagram accounts that have people posting stuff about looking for roommates, and I am able to see what they are into and what they’re majoring in,” senior Austin Nykamp said. “Without social media, there is no telling who you could get roomed with and it really lets you find someone that’s just like you.”
Multiple colleges even have sites that help match students with common interests.
“Appalachian State University has this website that’s basically like a dating profile where you put up a bunch of stuff about yourself, and it will find you matches and requires you to reach out to them on social media,” senior Macie Marsh said.
For students attending college outside the state, social media can be especially helpful in meeting potential roommates.
“[Social media] definitely helped me a lot since I am going to a school in a different state, so I don’t exactly know who is going there,” said Shelby Reich, who will be attending the University of Tennessee. “There are two other people from this school going there, but I wanted to branch out and meet new people.”
Though the process of finding a college roommate has evolved since the time Northwood teachers went to school due to the rise of social media, some things never change. Hearing the chatter of concerned seniors often causes memories of college days to resurface in teachers.
“One year we had a suite, which meant we had our own rooms but had a connecting bathroom,” social studies teacher Erin Hull said. “I was a sophomore in college at the time, and my roommate was a senior. She would sometimes come into my room through the suite when I wasn’t there and go through my closet and wear my clothes.”
Like Hull, theatre arts teacher Kayla Sharp experienced the struggles of rooming with fellow college students.
“My sophomore year, my roommate and I roomed with two other girls who we kind of knew, and the two girls wouldn’t clean up their dishes from a party they had the night before,” Sharp said. “I then asked them to clean their dishes because my room was closest to the kitchen and it smelled terrible. The next morning I realized all the dishes were not in the sink, so I thanked them and recognized that they cleaned the dishes. However, that night when I was cooking meat lasagna and turned my oven to 425ºF, all of a sudden smoke started coming out. It turned out, instead of doing the dishes, they just put them in the oven so I wouldn’t see them. The fire department came, and they had to take my whole stove top and oven all the way down the two floors and put it outside while it was raining.”
Having a messy roommate is a common issue that students are likely to encounter during their college career, and social studies teacher Nicholas McAlister feels messy roommates are the hardest to get along with.
“The worst was when someone was not clean and not taking care of the day-to-day cleaning activities around the house, like doing the dishes and what-not,” McAlister said. “We did have one roommate that was just super, super messy and was hard to be around as a result.”
Though social media and the internet have restructured the way roommates are found, Hull says that living with a roommate still teaches young adults the same lessons it always has.
“Having a roommate is a fun and annoying experience, but it is good in terms of stepping up into adulthood and trying to figure things out on your own,” Hull said.
– By Madeline Conte
