Moving into a dorm your freshman year can be an enriching, exciting experience. You likely have a roommate for the first time in your life, someone who you get to confide in and share very limited space with. Moving out of your dorm can be even more exciting if your roommate situation didn’t go as planned. Here’s to hoping the former is more exciting than the latter.
Take out the trash.
Honestly, it’s the easiest chore and even easier if you don’t forget about it too often. Plus, it can give you some old-fashioned, chore leverage when everything else falls apart. The dishes aren’t done, but the trash can is empty? Looks like you’re the good roommate today. Accept his or her apologies and commence recreation. You’ve earned it.
Take advantage of any and all snack offerings.
If you’re lucky, your roommate will have awesome snacks. If you’re even luckier, your roommate’s parents will provide most of the snacks, lessening the guilt of monetary consumption because everyone knows parents’ money doesn’t count. Eat every last one, not to be a pig or a slob, but to start off the semester with the notion of sharing.
*Wear headphones. *
You will very likely listen to more music in college than you have or will at any other period of your life. Along this journey, you will explore, experiment and go through some phases. This can be a beautiful thing and a vital part of your education. Your roommate might not see it that way. Blasting experimental death pop on your record player might indicate a broadened palette, but it could engender some bad vibrations between you, your associate and your neighbors. It’d be much better to keep those vibrations between your Bose and your cochlea.
*Accept colds. *
In this new, tight space you’re sharing, illnesses will come. Wash your hands often, cough or sneeze into your elbow or sacrifice a swine on the altar but when a cold contaminates the both of you, don’t fret. No one wants to live with the roommate who points snotty fingers claiming that “you got me sick.” So follow your hygienic routines, but when your immunities prove to be inefficient, suck it up and sneeze without sadness.
*Play the Resident Mentor right. *
Your RM is there to help you, no question. It’s a bit of an uneasy job and if you can at least portray to that person that you and your roommate are mature and responsible, then he or she will stay out of your conflicts. While a mediator’s presence is certainly necessary in uncomfortable situations, an RM’s interference in a mundane conflict will make it seem bigger than it really is, blowing the argument out of proportion. If the RM trusts you, then you gain a lot of discretion with handling your petty dramas, which you may have plenty of.
*Fight respectably. *
Arguments will be inevitable. Anytime you feel like you should hold something back, go ahead and do that. Fortunately, most conflicts with your roommate sweep right over because you know you’ll have to live with him or her. Therefore, keep your roommate’s feelings in mind when you tell him or her off for eating all the snacks you had just bought.
Be bad influences on each other (to an extent).
College is seen by many as the gateway to the real world. However, that maxim still insists that college is not the real world. If your roommate decides to blow off that freshman year reading experience lecture, why don’t both of you sleep in? If he/she decides to eat ice cream past midnight every night, who’s to say you’re above the habit? Join in on that as well. It will only bring the two of you closer together.
*Above all, avoid being passive aggressive. *
If an issue is particularly distressful, make it known. Find the fine line between direct and confrontational. Sitting problems will arise again and again if unaddressed and their handling will only get trickier.
Living with someone in a freshman year dorm is not always such a breeze, but when else in your life have you had such an opportunity to know someone so well? The excitements that await both of you are the start of your immersion into life as a Gamecock. Hopefully you had the brains not to room with someone from your high school. If that’s the case, even this guide may not help you.
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