RANDOM ROOMMATE ASSIGNMENT

SWIPING THROUGH THE hundreds of Homecoming group photos, mirror selfies and senior pictures on the @miz_2027 Instagram account, I’m overwhelmed. How am I supposed to determine girls’ entire personalities from eight smiley photos and a 50-word caption about how they like “going out” and “hanging with friends?”

No Matter What

I could spend my last semester of high school stressing about speed dating these girls searching for my perfect match, but I’d rather put my energy towards scholarships and program applications and take the chance with a random roommate.

Sure, it could be a potential disaster come move-in day, but getting a random roommate could actually be the safer and less stressful route, plus I don’t have dangerously high expectations.

After finding someone on Instagram, Snapchatting and meeting for coffee, you think you’ve finally found the one. You pop the question — “Will you be my roomie?” So much work was put into finding this person and now you’ll start off college with a built-in, sifted-out bestie...in theory.

But living with someone is hard. For seniors who have only ever lived with their families, it can be a difficult adjustment. The added expectation that we’ll be best friends based on our shared love of “traveling” and “listening to music” could make an already pressured position worse. What do you say to your chosen roomie if you don’t like who they hang out with or you have different interpretations of what “going out” entails?

If you get randomly paired with someone and you find you’d rather not hang out with them outside the dorm, that’s okay. You’ll just be people who live together.

It’s not like random roommates are a total shot in the dark anyways — a lot of dorms have questionnaires to help pair you to someone with similar schedules and hobbies.

I can understand trying to build this bond

story by caroline wood

if you’re headed out of state and don’t know anyone. But since I’ve committed to Mizzou where I’ll know people from East, I don’t need to find a starter friend going into college. I’ll see how things go with my roommate and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll still have friends.

My biggest fear is hating them. Something as simple as living in a constant mess could dampen the start of my college experience, but a chosen roommate has the same odds of failure. After all, no one’s going to add “I don’t use headphones when watching midnight TikToks” or “I wake up at the crack of dawn to do yoga” to their Instagram caption.

Plus it’s only freshman year. And if we truly cannot stand to be around each other, I’ll just switch roommates at semester. While the suspense of who my soon-to-be roommate will be is a bit stressful, I’m so excited to see who fate pairs me with to either potentially make a lasting friendship or have a funny story to laugh about one day.