Moving to college really constitutes one major, basically universal change in most everyone: living in a dorm with a roommate, usually someone you've never met before and usually the first other person besides family you've ever lived with on a one-on-one basis.
This can either be a really good thing or a really bad thing, it is largely up to pure chance and sometimes a little bit of luck. Sure, before submitting a housing application you fill out a little bit about yourself-- study habits, noise-level preferences, sleep patterns, little things that could potentially help out your roommate selectors pair you with someone more adept to your schedule so you don't go crazy and kill each other within the first few weeks.
Still, this schedule does not always match up perfectly and even if you do both go to bed regularly at 1 in the morning every night, this doesn't necessarily mean your personalities will be in sync and you'll be shown riding off into the sunset on horseback, best friends for life.
When I was first assigned a roommate, I got a basic about her sheet with your basics: full name, phone number, address, and not much else. Also included was a "getting to know your roommate" instructions, which basically gave basics you could talk about such as, what do you do for fun and what kind of books or music do you like, where did you grow up, things like that. It also instructed you to call your roommate at least once before moving in because corresponding through email or via facebook could give you not so much of an accurate perception. I didn't make a phone call and neither did my roommate, so meeting her was kind of a surprise. I didn't regret not calling her, I feel like it would have made for a very awkward conversation.
I did become her friend on facebook, however, and just basically messaged her back and forth, increasingly more often as the move-in date drew near. Our conversation was very light and mostly superficial, do you party, what kind of music do you like, what's your major, what's your hometown like--- blah, blah blah. But it really helped to get a kind of feel for the person, even though I had absolutely no idea what to expect.
After move-in, the first few days were kind of weird. I'm basically used to solitary time alone but with another person living in the same little cube as I do, it was kind of strange to adjust to. I'm pretty lucky with my roommate, however. We don't really have a ton in common and we're not the best of friends or anything, but we get along just fine. We're both very laid back and don't have any problems with people staying over or music or anything really.
Some of the people I've met haven't gotten so lucky-- not at all. One has a roommate who she has practically nothing in common with and who wakes up really early and goes to bed really early and doesn't exactly talk to her roommate and instead just leaves angry notes around.
My roommate in particular is from Minnesota as well, although north of the Twin Cities instead of south. She's small and has dark brown hair and listens to country, pop, and some rock. She studies with the TV on, usually switched to MTV or some similar channel, and she has a lot of friends who attend to UWEC as well, and one or two of them is usually in the room, especially on weekends. Her classes begin at 8 AM every morning except for Friday when she has no classes and her first class is her math class. She's a business major and does not really have any idea about what she wants to do later in life, or at least she didn't know when I talked to her about it this summer. We don't really talk about school a lot together or the future or anything really "deep" or even meaningful, but we get along just fine.
The room we occupy together is arranged in a fashion where both beds are on opposite walls and both in the lofted postion. We have two desks at the ends of our bed nearest to the door. Under my bed, which is on the left, is the black futon I brought while under her bed on the right is our two fridges stacked on top of each other and the TV she brought stacked on two of her storage containers. We both have our dressers in our closets and have our clothes and other items arranged in a mostly similar way to the point where our room is divided almost neatly in half.
A lot of other dorms are arranged in many other ways with different bed lofting positions or bunking or even two beds on the floor and other various assortments of futons and chairs and televisions and other stuff. Our layout works nicely because we have an adequate amount of space to still have floor area and to fold out the futon into a nice comfortable bed whenever we have guests staying.
The residence hall I stay in has four floors and three wings on each floor. I'm living on the fourth floor in 4-North. We have quiet hours that start every night on the week days and Sunday at 10PM. Quiet hours basically means we have to lower our voices, our TVs/music, and shut our doors, no big deal really. On Friday and Saturday, quiet hours begin at midnight.
I can't really think of anything more else to blather on about in regards to my residence hall experiences so I believe this is where I'll end this beast of a post for tonight.
