How random is your roommate?

Ali Gold, Elizabeth Grossman, Olivia Szymanski | Freshman Press Reporters

Every July 1 at midnight, with a few clicks of a mouse, new and returning students seeking on-campus housing find out in which dorm, in what type of room and with whom they will be living for the upcoming year.

While this moment of logging into WebSTAC may be stressful for all, freshmen who elect to receive what is often colloquially dubbed a “random” living partner may be especially anxious. The “random” assignment is based off of information on each freshman’s housing contract, such as preferences on types of housing and a five-question survey about the student’s living habits.

While the possibility of being assigned to share a small space with an unknown, potentially dissimilar person may create fear for new students, the method used to assign roommates to those who do not submit a mutual request is not arbitrary. Those in the Residential Life office, including Assistant Director for Residential Life Rhonda Kiely, work for weeks using an assignment method that tries to ensure that roommates are optimally matched and assigned to a suitable room.

“Every student, if they get their room and board application in by the date we start running, gets a randomly assigned lottery number,” Kiely said. “The day we start running, we push this button, and it creates this big matrix.”

Most students are accepted to the university during March, and housing applications are requested by May 1. However, students can edit their applications until May 31. The process of assigning rooms involves disability services, dieticians and the entire Residential Life office and lasts primarily during the month of June. Students assigned to higher lottery numbers will have a greater chance of being placed in their choice room.

“You want to give as much care to the first person who went in the process as you want to do to the last person,” Kiely said. “We really do value getting students into their choices, but we also want them to match well with people. Is it going to be a perfect match? Probably not, but it’s not going to be an intentionally bad match, either.”

The algorithm used will typically match people based on their commonalities, Kiely said. However, it actually strives to pair people coming from dissimilar geographic situations in the same room.

“One interesting characteristic we have is that we tell it not to match on geography,” Kiely said. “That’s what [the program] starts with.”

According to Kiely, many students may match perfectly with multiple potential roommates. However, the program used to assign roommates will choose a roommate from a different state or country over other matches who are from the same location.

After the program sorts out roommates with the same geographical location, it will try to find possible matches with similar answers to the questions that students fill out on a survey. The questions are aimed at examining students’ living habits, including cleanliness, study habits and sleep schedules.

“We want people who are neat living with people who are neat, and people who study in their rooms with [people who] study in their room,” Kiely said. “And it kind of goes down that way until we can actually match you.”

She also suggested students be honest and upfront when filling out their housing applications. At times, she receives complaints from people whose parents completed the survey for them.

“Mark them down as you know you are, not as you hope to be,” Kiely said. “Mark them down yourself, don’t have Mom and Dad mark them down.”

Kiely started at Washington University in 1988 as one of two Residential College Directors. Since that time, the number of Residential College Directors has reached 13. Other aspects of roommate assignment have evolved since that time, including the introduction of social media into the process. Many students choose to use university-specific Facebook groups to find similar roommates or use websites that match students based on questionnaires that are more in depth than the housing contract survey.

“Now media—social media—has made a major influx there, and people are meeting their future roommates through the media links,” Kiely said. “They’re jumping exponentially, the number of students who are coming in with a pre-selected roommate. We used to have many, many more people going through the random process.”

The process may be changing, but so is the level of student contentment with the housing process. This year set high standards for meeting students’ requests for housing.

“We actually ended up getting 81 percent of students in their first choice and 17 percent of students in their second choice,” said Kiely. “So we came up to 98 percent in their first or second choice, which I think is pretty incredible, based on our past performance.”

While many students request a specific roommate, others complete the form and leave the rest to the Office of Residential Life. Kiely suggests that there are certain benefits to this approach.

“Washington University values diversity at the highest level, and this is the one and only time in your university career when you’re probably going to be in a situation where you don’t have some control over either where you live or who you live with,” Kiely said. “Having to adapt to the unknown is a skill-building opportunity, and as ResLife people, we see a lot of value in that.”

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