For those of us that chose to eschew the Madison apartment mad dash for the dorm life, today, Feb. 3, is a big deal. Today is the Notice of Intent deadline, which not only includes a statement of intent to move back into the university dorms, but also a roommate request.
Few things in this world are as stressful as finding a roommate. Or, more simply, finding a relationship and judging it before it has started. During my first semester, I completely gave up and let the system set me up with a random roommate, which worked out unbelievably well. We are three completely different people. However, those differences really work in our favor and have given us all the opportunity to embrace college as an exploration of self, society and culture. We aren’t perfect and disagree on a range of topics because of our differences, but we have learned valuable skills in compromising and knowing when to just stop talking. We either had sheer dumb luck or had each taken a vial of Horace Slughorn’s Felix Felicis from “Harry Potter” that enabled the computer system to bring us together.
If the new University of Wisconsin Facebook app RoomSync had been available for me to scope out potential roomies before, I don’t know if I would have chosen them for myself. This is a blessing in disguise, as I have seen best friends come to school together and either isolate themselves from everyone else or explode at each other. Somehow the cosmos of the universe knew exactly what to do. But how does one choose a roommate, choose a friend, out of the blue for themselves? I would be devastated if a random computer program was better able to pair two numbers than I am in finding a person to get along with.
This is the first time UW has provided a program to help students staying in dorms find potential roommates. It has a typical questionnaire about sleeping, studying and eating habits. While most of those answers seem easy enough, as I clicked through I wondered to myself which things I lied about. Intentionally or idealistically, there is a little bit of fiction to every piece of truth. Perhaps I say I am neater than reality or my study habits were as studious as I wished; perhaps I am trying to find a roommate I hoped I could be in college and not who I necessarily am. But if you are too dishonest, you attract people who will only grow to loathe you because they were honest about going to bed at 10:30 p.m., and you go to bed at 3 a.m. unabashedly. A profile needs balance between “totally cool livable roommate” and someone who will definitely wear gingerbread pajamas. My struggle was to find a place between being honest about being myself and convincing someone that I’m normal enough to live with for a year. I found my current roommate solely based on the habits we put online. When we were face to face, I did not know what to say to about my interests or favorite activities. Respectful bedtime habits were on repeat in my head. Do I tell them that I break into random song? Do I tell them I make jokes no one understands? I’ve never stopped to think what makes a relevant basis for companionship. Suddenly I had to evaluate a relationship before I was even in it.
Searching for a roommate has caused me to consider if we can pick friends for ourselves or if they simply surprise us. I’ve had friends in my life selected for me and it never turns out as well as the ones that appear in my life by luck. So which type is a roommate?
After meeting with my roommate for next year, I find she is a bit of both. She is someone that appeared out of a sea of options and she is someone that was chosen for me by a computer program. We know the basics in the ways we are the same and will discover more ways we converge and diverge as we go through the next year. Or I might find out that a random algorithm on a computer is smarter than I am. For all dorm dwellers, we have to wait until fall to prove our superiority over the main frame. This obstacle is in our rearview mirror. All that’s left is to move on, Wisconsin.
Abigail Zemach ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in food science.
