On April 4, freshman Gabe Bourgeois took his fate into his own hands. With a few choice keystrokes, he was able to direct the course of his freshman year social life.
Web site: Facebook.com. Group: Class of 2012. New Discussion Topic: Guys Roommate Search.
"Roommate matchmaking," or the selection of one's own freshman-year roommate, is a growing phenomenon: 66 freshman pairs chose their own roommates this year, compared to 60 from the Class of 2011. According to Yolanda King, director of Residential Life and Learning, the number has been on a slow and steady rise for some time.
Though some students choose to live with high school friends, many, like Bourgeois, are hand-selecting strangers for roommates.
Take freshmen Courtney Adams and Natalie Matheny, who became friends on Facebook before ever setting foot on the Hill.
"We had never met," Adams said. "She lives in Virginia; I live in Illinois. We had no mutual friends. We didn't know each other whatsoever."
Adams and Matheny sent each other pages of messages for months and found they were very compatible. They shared embarrassing stories with each other and even high school lingo — Adams' term for prom drama, "proma," quickly spread to Matheny and her friend circle. Eventually, they decided to request each other as roommates.
"If you're going to be with someone for a year, it's a pretty important thing in terms of the freshman experience," Bourgeois said. "I wasn't scared of getting a bad roommate, just being optimistic about the situation. I might as well put in a little extra effort; I have better knowledge of myself than some random system."
Freshman Reed Shimberg was one of the 105 freshmen who responded to Bourgeois' post. Though Shimberg ultimately used the Tufts housing questionnaire and the subsequent random pairing, he found it to have many flaws.
"I thought it was skimpy to say the least. I just felt that it was kind of lacking. Like it only asked me if I drink or smoke, if I like people in the room or if I went to bed early. There was a ‘yes,' ‘no' or ‘kind of.' There wasn't a scale," Shimberg said. "I definitely would have made it so there was a scale. If you were going to go to bed, what time would it be? Late. Does that mean four in the morning or 12 at night? The words were kind of nonspecific."
According to King, the questionnaire covers important topics, but the Office of Residential Life and Learning (ORLL) is always open to student opinion.
"Right now, we take our cues from students," King said. "We update the forms based on feedback from the Senate every two to three years."
But King said she has no plans to create a more complex personality study.
"I think everything is on there for now. I think we ask all the relevant questions: study habits, type of music, bedtime," King said. "Most conflict is very personalized to students and deals with lifestyle differences. We can't ask questions about all those things — what I call ‘intimate details.'"
Other universities do try to account for all those details. At the University of Richmond, students are asked to send in lengthy answers to a long list of questions. These forms are then all hand-matched by the housing staff.
And Davidson College in North Carolina has an especially sophisticated process.
"We read every folder of every incoming freshman," said Judy Klein, security access coordinator at Davidson. "We make our own notes on a separate sheet. In addition to taking those notes and what we glean from reading their essays — their ‘Why they want to come to Davidson' [essays] — and basically looking at their application, we also look at their preference card and their Myers-Briggs."
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a personality test based on renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung's theories. The results divide the test takers based on considerations of: extroversion vs. introversion, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling and judging vs. perceiving.
"We place them where they are going to be in their rooms, and then we start pulling from these different piles [to place them on a floor]. We'll have different athletic groups on the floors, we'll have some international, some [with] academic risk," Klein said.
The housing process at Davidson is very time consuming: The staff spends 15 to 20 minutes on each of the approximately 500 incoming students' folders. Klein said that the system has been in place for over 19 years and that her office is looking for a more efficient one.
But perhaps the effort goes a long way.
"My friend who goes to Davidson had to take an hour-long personality assessment, and she absolutely loves her roommate. They get along great, almost too well," Shimberg said. "In the end, that's worth it because you have to live with this person for a year. It's worth an hour of your time or however long it takes you."
Bourgeois put in the extra time. He sent Facebook messages to four or five incoming students who had already paired up before ultimately finding his roommate, freshman Martin Ribadeneira.
Though his methods were not as scientific as those used at Davidson, Bourgeois believes that his system was more refined than the one employed by the ORLL.
"It's hard to get a feel for someone off the questions [Tufts] gives you. You can see a lot more from a Facebook profile than just one aspect," he said. "A picture says 1,000 words, so you get a better sense of your potential roommate. You can look at the wall posts and see what type of people they talk to. Are they social?" he said.
Ultimately, Bourgeois was looking for someone fresh.
"I didn't want some white New England boy like me. That's boring. Part of the reason I came to Tufts was for its diversity," Bourgeois said.
Ribadeneira is from Ecuador and has helped Bourgeois sharpen his language skills.
Though Klein stressed how liking one's roommate "sets the tone for your being happy or unhappy [at school]," some students feel that random selection is a beneficial process.
"I think it's good because it makes everyone deal with not necessarily the perfect situation," sophomore Alex Abeger said. "Some people are lucky and they get a perfect situation, which is awesome for them. The other people who don't necessarily have the perfect situation get the experience of having to deal with someone who's not like them. For the rest of your life, you're going to be dealing with people who aren't like you. College is a good time to learn how to deal with people you don't necessarily agree with."
