[OT] Freshman room assignments

Any suggestions/anecdotes on how to get a good room assignment/roommate as a freshman? My cousin will be a freshman next year and she is working on filling out the housing information. If you put down that you're neat, does that mean you'll end up with an obsessive neat freak as a roomie? What about the question about what hours you typically keep? Does the housing office tend to ignore that stuff or do they really try to find someone compatible?

Any amusing stories would be welcome too.

TIA.

Get a single...I thought it might be a good idea to know someone early on, so when they assigned me to a single, I asked for a change...that was a terrible idea, they stuck me in the transfer center, I was the only freshman in the building, and my roommate was nuts...by the end of the first semester we shared about 10 words a week.

A friend and I from high school requested a double on West. We got stuck in singles in different buildings on North. I'm not convinced they even read them.

[Q]CowbellGuy Wrote:

A friend and I from high school requested a double on West. We got stuck in singles in different buildings on North. I'm not convinced they even read them.[/q]

Maybe they just don't read them anymore. 30+ years ago, I requested to room with a buddy whom I'd known since kindergarten. We were paired up in U Hall 5. Don't think he ever graduated, so maybe he's still available.

BTW, Age, he was Firebell Guy that I told you about.

Ironically, I'm heading back to Ithaca this weekend to meet up with another buddy whose daughter is on the Dartmouth women's lax team. He was my RA in UH5. We'll have to stop by to show our wives the palatial accommodations we had back then. Hey, I heard a rumor that they've spiffed up the place a bit. Does that mean the old chicken shit green cinder block walls have changed? Oh, the humanity.

I don't think they look at anything beyond smoking. They do pair you up if you request a specific roommate though.

[Q]Tub(a) Wrote:
They do pair you up if you request a specific roommate though.[/q]
I just said they didn't for me.

I ended up bearing witness to a love triangle between my roommate, her boyfriend who lived downstairs, and some dude who was a practice player for the hockey team and would stop by every night so my roommate could "practice" for her Swedish massage class. n.b. this guy shaved his legs and denied doing so, claiming he had some sort of disorder that made his leg hair really short.
The roommate cranked up the heat to 90 to "remind her of home," played the same damn song over and over on her computer, had upwards of twenty five pictures of herself displayed and asked to snort my ritalin prescription.
My next door neighbor's (and future best friend) roommate had a similar picture problem, asked my friend not to speak to her or others when both of them were in the room so she could "pretend it was a single," frequently talked over people, and obsessively bought coats.
Both my friend's and my roommate requested and got singles after the first semester. Apparently, my friend and I were the weird ones. But God smiled on us, no one new moved in, our former roommates go stuck in tiny low ceilinged rooms, and we got huge doubles to ourselves. With the two beds pushed together, this was especially good for entertaining.
On the other hand, I have friends who got along so well with their freshman roommates they lived together the next year as well.
Words of advice: compromise and adapt and tolerate. You can request a clean, non-smoking roommate, but there's no box to check that says, "roommate who doesn't freak out when you knock over her awkwardly placed self portraits with your backpack when entering your shared 90 degree room to find her astraddle a shaved jv hockey player when her boyfriend is downstairs."

I suspect they usually will pair you up if you request a specific roommate - I know plenty of people who did. Age, you probably just had bad luck. I assume they order the room requests in some way (random, FIFO?) and you were late enough that they were out of doubles on West.

No idea how the process really works though. I did get paired up with my friend from high school. But we ended up in our third choice, Cascadilla, which we put down largely to help ensure that we'd get one of our first two (not thinking that we would actually get a room in C-town). Worked out real well - great dorm/floor and I loved the five minute flat walk to the Engineering Quad.

It took me and my freshman year roommate a semester (or two?) to adjust to living with each other... and we decided to live together sophomore year. Out of all the people I've lived with, she's the only one I'd ever choose to live with again.... and this includes my best friends.

I'll go out on a limb and guess that the process now is a bit different than for most of us old timers, since all the frosh are on North Campus now. Who knows - maybe Dickson is the party dorm now?

I requested a double and got a single, probably because I turned in my housing form in early May....I ended up in Court, a brand new dorm. Looked lovely, and was very social, but turned out to have a few problems. The lounges (with huge glass windows) were freezing in the winter and it was impossible to watch TV because of the glare whenever it was sunny. All of the walls are super-thin, so I could talk to my neighbors at a normal conversational tone. As in, "Hey Whit, got a stapler?" "Sure, hold on." My alarm woke them up in the morning. And Whit and Emily once thought my screen saver was making a chirping noise (it was actually Emily's computer...but the fact that they thought they could hear my screen saver through the wall says something...).

There were a lot of people on my floor that had roughly the same habits as their roommates, but some of the rooms were occupied by one neat freak and one very messay person, and others had one insomniac and one person that needed 8 hours of sleep, every night. I don't think they completely ignore the forms, but I doubt they make any special effort to find your new best friend.

[Q]Robb Wrote:

I'll go out on a limb and guess that the process now is a bit different than for most of us old timers, since all the frosh are on North Campus now. Who knows - maybe Dickson is the party dorm now?[/q]

LOL. I spent four years in Dickson, and was very pleased with the tomb-like atmosphere. I spent 8-10 hours a day in Mary Donlon and was happy to be able to leave whenever I wanted and get to sleep without any problems.

Cheers,
Kyle

One word: Townhouse

Yes they give them to freshmen these days; had one my freshman year (usually, it's 4 per house, though there are some with 6 per house I think), and it was great. No horror stories from me; still best of friends with the other 3 guys.

Like others have said, though, request a single (if you don't want a townhouse).

A single is a good thing to have. You might form a lasting bond with your roommate in a double (are there still occasional triples in Dickson?) but the person also might be wacko. You can form and maintain friendships with the person across you in a floor of singles.

If the form still says [] smoke, [] don't smoke but ok if roommate smokes, [] don't smoke, that middle box was for kids who smoked and didn't want their parents to know it.

If you don't get the roommate, or class, you want, mention suicide at the clinic. Colleges are gun-shy about this kind of attrition, so even if they think you're faking, you get the benefit of the doubt and can drop a class with academic penalty in December, or switch roommates, or whatever. If the loosely tied people get the breaks, why shouldn't you also.

Hey - make sure the entering freshman knows the basics of laundry. A lot of freshmen think white underwear plus their new red Cornell tees (never washed) plus hot water plus bleach will make the white stuff whiter and the red stuff redder.

[Q]CowbellGuy Wrote:

A friend and I from high school requested a double on West. We got stuck in singles in different buildings on North. I'm not convinced they even read them.[/q]

Even elite schools are in competition for the best students. If it makes you happy to get a friend as a roommate, they'd do it. I know there's blather in the freshman guides about how it broadens you to get a person off a Montana ranch as your roommate, but maybe his habit of rising at the crack of down is a little too broadening.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

Hey - make sure the entering freshman knows the basics of laundry. A lot of freshmen think white underwear plus their new red Cornell tees (never washed) plus hot water plus bleach will make the white stuff whiter and the red stuff redder. [/q]

LOL. I accidentally did that my freshman year. One of my track t-shirts went unnoticed into the underwear load. Turned about 2 weeks worth of whites into pinks. Good thing Mom was smart enough to send me off with about 6 weeks worth.

On a related note, I don't know if they still do it, but a couple of times the guys who did the laundry for the athletic teams used to throw red dye in for Valentine's Day and green dye in for St. Patrick's. We'd come in to get our socks, t-shirts and jock straps only to find the baskets full of colored goods. I'm sure they had a good chuckle knowing the teams were running around in red or green jocks. Then, when the usual white stuff was back, there were always a bunch of the colored ones still mixed in. For whatever reason, guys avoided them. Since those didn't get worn day-after-day, the easiest way to make sure you had one that was in good shape was to simply grab for red or green in the basket.

Well...actually, there's one half of one floor (where I live) that is really active and noisy. I have no idea how I get any work done with so much distraction.

In all back and forth about working mothers (when mom is hope, it nurtures the kid vs. when mom is working, the kid learns independence) one positive attribute of both parents coming home dead tired from work was they were in no mood to wash that very special pair of jeans you just had to wear the next day ... so you learned to do laundry on your own and thus didn't have the problem of the whites becoming pink from being washed with your red Cornell T-shirt.

All I can say is that writing more on that housing sheet seems to help: My freshman year roommate checked off all the boxes and wrote "clarifying" notes in the margins to make sure she got a good housing assignment. We ended up paired in Donlon (great dorm), and it turned out eveyrthing we had matched: everything was blue, shoes were similar, clothing looked the same, we kept the same hours, etc. Things worked out so well, we lived together sophmore and senior year as well. So maybe the housing office does pay attention to those sheets.

Then again, they also put two girls--both named Rebecca K.--in the same room. Asking for my friend, Becca, on the phone was a real pain in the butt that year.