Get Along With Your Roommate

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Mixx] [Reddit] [StumbleUpon] [Twitter] [Email]

For many college students, having a roommate in college is a new experience. Many of us aren’t used to living in the same space as another person. Sure, students lived with their parents before, but sharing a room in a dorm with another student is much different than sharing a house or apartment with your family.

Because your dorm-mate is someone not in your family, he or she is probably not familiar with the idiosyncrasies of your living and sleeping habits. Nor are you familiar with those of your dorm-mate. Even if you’ve lived with a friend in a dorm for a few years, it still takes some time to get used to that other person.

These gaps in familiarity can, if not adjusted for, create miscommunications, weird situations, and even outright conflicts between roommates. If you want to avoid this sort of thing, you should consider setting up a roommate agreement with your roommate so that you both understand how to live together in peace.

One of the biggest things you and your roommate should establish is how you’ll decide to share each other’s stuff. How will you manage common aspects of the dorm room? Usually roommates agree to share stuff like a fridge and microwave, with one roommate buying one appliance and the other buying something else. Also, what about furniture? Or the layout of the room? Or if it’s okay to borrow something from your roommate’s desk? If you can agree on these particulars early on, then you’ll have less of a chance of worrying about a sudden change of layout or whether or not you have the right to use the fridge during midterms.

Now that you’ve agreed on how to use the stuff in the room, you should agree on how you will respect each other’s habits when in and out of the room. An important thing to establish early is whether or not you’ll be locking the room when you’re both out and about. Also, you should talk about letting other people hang out in the room. You should talk about bedtimes and wakeup times. All of these things, even though you may not think about them during the excitement of that first week, will become really important as the semester progresses, especially when you find yourself stressed out about your classes. If you and your roommate get along well and agree on everything in the room, then you’ll be able to handle the stress of school much easier.

Quick Degree Finder