How I Chose my Roommate
Pretty soon upcoming students will be receiving acceptance letters and beginning to prepare for their college experience. One of the first things you are required to do to prepare for your freshman year is figure out your housing arrangements, aka where you want to live and who you are going to live with. As for roommate options, you can either request a specific person or choose to have a random selection.
This year, first year students were required to live on campus, which I was planning on doing anyways. I did not have any girl friends coming to NC State that I would room with, so I got one of my friends to add me to a Facebook group of upcoming first year students looking for roommates. Everyone wrote they were looking for a roommate and then a little blurb about themselves- what they like, are majoring in, are looking for in a roommate, whatever they felt was important for a potential roommate to know about them! If you found someone you thought you would match up with, you could easily like their status, comment, or message them to show interest! I spoke to a few different girls, but my now roommate was the only one that I connected with. We had not previously known each other and did not live close to each other, but we had similar interests such as we both played tennis in high school, both are in the College of Textiles, and both were planning to have a simple theme in the dorm with white bedding and accent pillows!
Once we had decided on each other, we had to pick where we wanted to live. Housing has a great website where you can view the features and rules of every residence hall! Based on these descriptions, we chose three different dorms. The way your housing application works is you can choose your roommate, answer a few questions about your sleep and study habits, and list your top three residence halls. During the residence hall assignment process, State takes your roommate request into the most consideration and then tries to accommodate to the rest of your criteria. We ended up living in our first choice!
Even though I did not know my roommate previously, things worked out really well for me! My boyfriend chose to do random assignment and his roommate situation worked out as well!
