College Roommates: Best Friend or Worst Enemy

Students are more or less all on their own once they go off to college, and they experience various new things for the first time. One of the bigger things new college students have to adjust to is having to live with a roommate, and how that roommate will most likely be a person that they have never even met before. A studen twill have to share that small dorm room for the entire school year, along with exposing almost everything he or she once had to yourself, so it is highly understandable that those students are worried about who they might end up getting paired with. While a great roommate may end up being a friend for life, and a person you can share almost anything with, you may also end up getting a bad roommate instead, a person who probably will not even attempt to make an effort to try to get to know you, and that, beyond any doubt, will weigh in on your already stressful freshman year.

The ideal roommate you would want will (hopefully) be easy to live with, as well as compatible with throughout the year. One that you will not be afraid to be yourself around. You will become friends with them, and do many things with them, such as attending campus events, study sessions, and going shopping for dorm-related items, and if you do not know anyone else at your college, expect to be around them a great deal of the time. Participating in activities around campus with your new-found college friend has the potential to take a new friendship and expand it to a massive one that will last a lifetime. A good roommate will also be accepting of your friend group and will at least make an effort to hang out with them at some point in time during college. They will try their best to be considerate when you are trying to do important things, such as working on an intense project assigned by your least favorite professor, sleeping soundly, or making an important phone call. Personally, I believe that I have one of those good roommates. My roommate does not judge what I do, is not too loud, helps out when needed around the dorm, occasionally buys me things I didn't even ask for, provided a lot of stuff for the dorm that we share (including a brand-new television and Keurig), and purchases things for us when I am unable to.

A not-so-ideal roommate, on the other hand, will do the exact opposite as stated above. Expect to feel restricted, with what you can do and how you can act around them. I am a college freshman, so I have yet to experience a bad roommate, but I have heard roommate horror stories from fellow college students who have/had had bad ones, and even family members who went off to college at some point. A bad roommate will never make an attempt to befriend you or your friends. You will see them come and go from the room to hang out with their other friends, and you may even end up attempting to communicate with them, but you most definitely will not get as much as you would have thought out of them. A bad roommate might also let the dirty dishes pile up, and will not take the responsibility to wash them, so voila, it will automatically become your chore, and your chore only. They also will never end up taking out the trash, so you can either live in a miniature landfill, or you can become prepared to do all of the cleaning by yourself, again, taking out the trash will become your chore. Also, definitely expect to buy almost all of the household products your roommate not buying any for the both of you to use.

Having a roommate during college can either for the most part be a blessing or a tragedy. If you are lucky, and you end up getting a roommate that you enjoy, the college experience as a whole will run a lot smoother. Alternatively, if the roommate is not so enjoyable to interact with, your college experience will go down the drain. Overall, being put into a new environment can be hard for many people, especially if the said environment is far away from home and the people you love. However, with the newfound opportunity of making friends with roommates and expanding relationships through others, roommates, in general, are an amazing positive to new students, which is highly significant when attending college, or otherwise known as, high school part two.