Everything changes when you get to college – the places, the people, the lifestyle. Amid all this, it may be tempting to maintain order where you can. While it’s fine to use the same comforter or backpack you had in high school, consider living with someone you don’t already know. Rooming with an initial stranger rather than a lifelong friend can be a memorable experience and it can also expand your horizons. As a case study, here are nine things I learned from my “random” roommates:
1. The world extends beyond the Bay. Having grown up in the East Bay, I was shocked to discover that boba, saying “hella,” and iceblocking aren’t that common in my roommates’ hometowns of Cincinnati and Rome. Of course I assumed they’d be enamored with all things NorCal, but to my surprise, they preferred to keep some of their own traditions intact. There may be more rain and fewer vegan options where they’re from, but that’s the way they like it, and that’s okay.
2. Crop tops are kinda my thing. My friends and I in high school were too nerdy and self-conscious to show midriff, but when one of my roommates offered to lend me a bold black and white tribal crop top as we headed out to one of our first frat parties, I decided to try it out. It turns out I’m a midriff-baring kind of person, something that never would have come up had I stayed with my high school friends.
3. Some of my music is sexist. One morning this fall, the three of us roomies were getting ready for class to a playlist titled “Angry 2000s Music,” which my friends and I made in high school. We were all enjoying the throwback until “The Bitch Song” by Bowling for Soup came on. It was a classic case of a song’s catchy melody getting in the way of me realizing nasty lyrics. My roommates pointed out the harmful double standard the word “bitch” perpetuates, something my high school friends and I had never realized. This is only one example of inconsistencies my roommates pointed out to me this year.
4. How to Harmonize. Being a band kid meant I only hung out and made music with other band kids in high school. Tuning various guitars and clarinets over the years meant we could stay on key with a simple melody pretty well, but humming along to Regina Spektor while reading about the Chicano Movement with my choir kid roommate has taught me how to sing chord tones and harmonies.
5. What Descartes would say about my love life. My friends and I growing up were all kind of English and history people, and we didn’t care too much for philosophy. When you have a roommate who’s psyched about Philosophy 25B, however, every piece of advice is punctuated with “As Descarte/Hume/Kant/Berkeley/Spinoza would tell you…” Yes, even the advice about guys.
6. Make out tips. My girlfriends and I all learned how to make out from the same February 2009 issue of Seventeen Magazine, so we all had the same moves in high school. The conversations at 11 pm on Thursday nights in which my roomies and I debriefed about the week’s hookups in the comfort of our pajamas in between sips of mugfuls of Izze soda gave me tips to try out the next week and consequently more stories for the following Thursday’s debriefing session.
7. It’s okay to cry… a lot. My high school friends wouldn’t always get it if I cried over something seemingly trivial to them, like a B on a paper, so I’d suck it up. When you live with someone, however, there’s no hiding how you feel. Every week one of us would have a good cry over whatever was bothering us. Sometimes it was something big, like missing our parents, and sometimes it was something small, like just being overworked, over-caffeinated and overwhelmed. But when you realize that complete strangers are actually just as neurotic as you, you learn to not feel any weaker for being emotional.
8. Fighting can be healthy. When you fight with your friends in high school, there is a lingering worry in the back of your mind that this fight could be the end. When you move in with a stranger, you don’t have a relationship to lose, and you fight freely. And in many cases, you become best friends anyway, and you learn that fighting doesn’t have to get in the way of good relationships.
9. People are, on average, fairly decent. It can be scary to live with people you’ve never met and know nothing about, but when they turn out to be fabulous, you realize people overall aren’t too shabby. That’s the real reason for choosing to live with random roommates – you grow to admire them for being great in so many ways different than what you’re used to.
