Roommates: how to get along with them: it's not easy to share your space with someone else. Here's how to do it successfully - college bound

Career World, Feb-March, 2004 by Diana K. Serquina

Going from high school to college involves many changes. One of the biggest is living with a roommate. Whether you room with a friend or someone you've just met, having a calm place to come home to is important.

Be Realistic

Natasha Luepke, a junior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), is from Atlanta, Georgia. Her freshman roommate is from Omaha, less than an hour from Lincoln. Luepke says she thought, "We'll be great friends, and she'll take me home all the time, and it'll be awesome!" This thought wasn't shared by her roommate, who was mostly living with her boyfriend.

Don't expect your roommate to be your best friend, especially at first. Susan Stubblefield, assistant director of residential life at the University of Minnesota, says, "As with every relationship, it takes time to develop.... Give yourselves time to get acquainted."

Communicate

Many schools tell students who their roommates will be in advance. Doug Zatechka (pronounced ZAT-es-ka), Ph.D., director of housing at UNL, says, "We encourage them to call each other, E-mail each other, talk about their likes and dislikes, about their goals at the university, about who's going to bring what to the room."

It may seem silly to talk about what to bring, but unused items just take up needed space. Luepke says, "I wrote to my roommate before I moved in. I never heard back ... and since she never contacted me over the summer, we wound up with two TVs, two computers, two refrigerators, two microwaves."

Compromise

When any two people live together, there will be things they don't agree on. Try to be flexible. Even if you and your roommate have much in common, there will be some minor conflicts. The trick is to deal with them before they grow.

Stubblefield says, "For example, one roommate may not be able to sleep with the light on. So, they agree that after a certain time of night, the other roommate will use the study room if they need to study. The other roommate has a study group that he or she wants to have meet in the room. Maybe they compromise on how late the study group can stay, or have the study group meet on the night the other roommate has night class."

UNL tries to help students set ground rules. Zatechka says, "We want to strongly encourage students to sit down and be very honest and frank about their likes and dislikes and come to some agreement."

Sometimes the answer is a change of roommates. Lynn Anderson, a freshman at Creighton University in Omaha, had a roommate who wasn't a good match for her. She says, "She is a neat freak, loves popular culture, and needs to have her friends around all the time. She was opposed to my mess, I disliked having all her friends in my room, and we just could not reconcile some of our issues. So I moved down the hall, and the two of us are still friends. We were just not cut out to be roommates."

Living with a Friend

Living with a friend may bring some problems you might not expect. "The reason," Zatechka says, "is that good friends assume they can get along, but they often fail to explore a lot of things that occur when you're living together that you never experience when you're not living together. And then they're even more afraid of offending each other, so the little things build up, and then there are some explosions."

Another issue is that people you think you know can change. In her freshman year, Elisabeth Chretien (pronounced cray-tee-EN), now a sophomore at the University of Nebraska, roomed with someone she knew from high school. She says, "When we realized that we were both going to be living in the same dorm and had a lot of the same preferences when it came to roommates, we just decided we should live together.

"At first, things worked out great," Chretien says. However, her roommate started dating someone, and Chretien says, "Her whole personality changed. She began smoking and drinking--at one point, she started using drugs."

Chretien's roommate often asked her to leave so she and her boyfriend could have some privacy. Chretien says, "One time, they even came in and asked me to leave after I had already gone to bed!"

Chretien says, "I let her have her own way in everything, and I just learned to stay out of her way when I should have told her, 'This is my room too!'"

This year, Chretien was assigned a roommate whom she describes as "the complete opposite" of her first roommate. She says, "She helps out with the chores, picks up after herself, keeps her space clean and neat, and is generally very easy to live with."

Luepke had the opposite experience. She now lives off-campus with a friend she knew before becoming roommates. She likes it better than living with the roommate the school paired her with. She says, "It helps knowing the person first--you know what to expect."

You can't predict whether you'll do better rooming with a friend or with a stranger. Either way, you will need to put some effort into it for the relationship to work.

RELATED ARTICLE: What kind of roommate are you?

Many schools use computerized matching systems to pair roommates. While they do help prevent some bad matches, they aren't flawless. Doug Zatechka, director of housing at UNL, explains that because they rely on students' answers to questions about themselves, they are only as accurate as the student is honest.