Random Roommates Work

In Anna Altman’s article, “A College Education Should Include Rooming With a Stranger” she addresses the idea stated in the title, the benefits and drawbacks of living with a stranger during a student’s freshman year of college.
In my experience, I can say that the article title is a valid opinion and I agree with Altman. I came to Lenoir-Rhyne all the way from Bel Air, Maryland so I knew nobody here. I didn’t meet anyone at the Red and Black day, so I opted for a random assignment. Needless to say, my roommate and I were not compatible. We both liked to watch sports, but the similarities ended there. To give you an idea of who he was, he was about six feet tall and 300+ pounds easy. He was not one to shower often, nor did he brush his teeth regularly. It didn’t take long for our room to have an odor to it, as hard as I tried to fight it.
His sleeping habits weren’t much better. He would fall asleep with the television on an incredibly loud setting, too loud to fall asleep to. While it was something more or less out of his control, his snoring only added to the nighttime orchestra in our room. His morning routine followed with the theme of his lifestyle. He had an alarm set for 6:30am, which he rarely woke up to. After thirty minutes of the most obnoxious alarm imaginable, he would proceed to turn it off and fall right back asleep, sleeping through his morning classes. To this day, I will never understand the point of the alarm or how he lasted as long as he did in school.
The point of my telling how terrible my roommate was is to say that while my experience with this complete stranger was a miserable time in my freshman year, I can look back and appreciate what the experience did for me and how it made me who I am now. People always say that hindsight is 20/20, and I can agree with that statement. Learning how to live with someone is not an easy task, especially when you’re at the disadvantage of being an only child like I am. However, living with the awful roommate I did taught me that if I can live with the worst of them, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to live with someone tolerable or even a friend I would come to make in the coming school years and beyond. Now, in my sophomore year here at Lenoir Rhyne, my roommate is my best friend here and he and I have no problems or complaints with living together. He and I aren’t a perfect match, but we both know how to live with someone else and adapt to one another’s lifestyles, a skill I hadn’t learned until I got to college.
If my experience alone isn’t enough, my now roommate also had a sub par freshman living situation. He chose not to go with a random roommate, but to live with his high school friend. They chose to go to the same school and play baseball together, so living together seemed like an easy choice. By the end of the year, however, the friendship that came to LR was broken beyond repair. I was able to sit down and ask him how last year was able to help him be a better roommate and live with someone else. He told me that while he roomed with a friend he thought he would get along with well, it quickly went downhill and ended up in a situation no better than mine. He said that, like myself, living with a friend taught him what he doesn’t want in a roommate and also how to be a better roommate and change the things that are in his control so history doesn’t repeat itself.
In both my personal experience and my roommate’s, while we didn’t go the same route with picking a roommate we ended up in the same place. With our specific cases, it can probably be concluded that the random roommates would have been the better route, that way a friendship would still be intact and the same conclusions could be reached. Different experiences obviously produce different results, but in a more general sense of the study Altman’s conclusion seems valid enough.