Yes, privacy is the issue here, not the ability to get on with others.
I had to share a room in my first year at uni. I enjoyed living with students my own age, sharing a kitchen/bathroom was fine, I even got on OK with my room-mate. But what drove me crazy was the total lack of privacy. There was nowhere to be alone, other than the toilet. I used put off going back to my room as long as possible, hanging out in the library or walking around the streets. The tiniest, pokiest box-room would have been infinitely preferable to the spacious room we had, just so long as I had it to myself.
Learning to live with others is certainly part of the student experience, but this would happen even if students had single rooms. For some of us anyway, access to solitude is essential for sanity.
I personally think everybody should be forced to live with a stranger for a year. It just seems to me to be under the broad spectrum of Americans thinking we should be able to go through life without ever being offended or uncomfortable. You have to learn about life sometime, and dealing with people in a intense situation is part of life.
So the guy doesn’t like him eating eggs, and bitches about Psych classes? Well boo-freakin-hoo. Sorry, but it sounds like the nephew needs to grow a set. I hate to turn into my dad here, but realistically he probably has a better living situation than billions of people in the world will ever have. He’s there to learn, so let him learn a bit about being an adult in society, not all important learning comes from books.
of course, not every pairing of roommates is a hardship.
I graduated college in 1990 and I still frequently hang out with my college roommate, who can best be described as an unusually smart cartoon character. Because of him, I gained an appreciation of history and politics, sailing, world travel, blended drinks and the pratical application of military explosives to recalcitrant TV sets.
I’ve been following this thread for a while, but this is what has inspired me to post. By the way, no quarrel with your thoughts, Tamex, but I would like to gently comment on this statement, if I may.
I was a “commuter student” for all my university days, and I never felt left out. Friends were easy for me to make, and at least here in Toronto, it was easy to get home after late-night activities and pubs and whatnot. And I still hold a great fondness for my university–so much so that I was married in one of the chapels on the campus a few years ago. I truly felt a part of the place, and I suppose I still do.
There were many like me–people who commuted in from off-campus apartments, or from their parents’ homes or suchlike. That may have been the saving grace; there were many of us who commuted, and there were many of us who stuck with it until graduation. There was also no rule about having to live on campus at least for one year–and that was my saving grace; while I could afford tuition, books, and subway fare, I simply could not afford to live on campus. If I had to do that, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to go to school. (For reasons that I will not go into here, I was ineligible for grants or loans of any kind, so I did indeed work my way through school, paying every penny myself without anybody’s help. And I’m proud to say that my degree was fully paid for on the day I received it.)
I can understand the other side of the coin though–my American-born, raised, and educated wife couldn’t believe it when she heard I never lived in a dorm. She was–well, surprised, at how well-adjusted I was, and how easily I could make friends. Her reaction was somewhat like yours, to tell the truth, because she believed the same things you did, and said as much. But for my part, I couldn’t believe such a rule as the “live on campus at least one year” rule existed. I do now, of course; my wife and this thread prove it (although I believed her long before this thread popped up).
I think it has to do with the individual. I knew some who lived in dorms who dropped out, just as I knew some commuter students who dropped out. I knew some who tried both and dropped out, and I knew some of both who stuck it through until the end. It would seem to me that the character that is being built at a college or a university comes not from living in a dorm or riding a subway train, but from what is there to begin with. It may sound hokey, but there you go.
Well I think dorms are a great idea. I actually feel sorry for friends I have, who commute to school, because I feel like they’re missing out on so much.
During your time in the academic bubble, you have to discipline yourself to do work, manage your time, and so on. The other side of the coin is dorm life, where you learn to roll with it and deal with people who you would otherwise never have met. Yeah, I’ve had roommates who I didn’t get along with, but I also had roommates who I’m still friends with. I roomed with people from other countries, of other religions, and with different cultures from mine, plus a roomie from my hometown, just because. There’s a lot I wouldn’t have learned if I didn’t live in a dorm, the kind of stuff you don’t learn in classes.
Oh yeah, and I liked dorm life because you can go to the cafeteria for dinner and don’t have to make it yourself.
I don’t see anyone, beginning year student or otherwise, paying several thousand dollars for the privilege of being made to live with a stranger with whom they exhibit no particular signs of compatability, based often on little or nothing more than the fact that two people of the same gender are in need of a room.
I don’t understand the train of thought which has determined that this is a routine part of the college experience and that there are important life lessons to be derived therefrom which cannot be learned in another way.
I don’t understand the institutional choice (by institutions individually and across the board) to ignore every person’s need to occasionally enjoy privacy on their own terms and at their own schedule, a need which cannot be fulfilled when a person has no place where they can go and close the door and be alone until such time when they decide otherwise, as opposed to the time at which their roommate comes and wants to make use of the room as well.
I especially do not understand nor accept the idea that those who do not enjoy it or find it challenging beyond their desire (especially given that they paying for it) or capability to manage are failing to learn said crucial life lessons or are somehow lacking in an appropriate measure of openness, flexibility, willingness to compromise or maturity – yet my observations (as a student, a professor and now as the trusted non-parental confidante of several college students like my nephew) indicate that this was exactly what was insinuated (at least) or suggested (openly) to students who sought assistance with roommate problems from residence staff (RAs, RDs, etc.).
As for all of the details of my nephew’s situation, let’s just boil it down this way: he got stuck with a stranger because he didn’t know he’d be in the dorms until after spring semester ended and all of his friends were already committed to other roommates/housing situations. The roommate, by all descriptions over the weeks, isn’t just difficult but sanctimonius and overbearing in a way that might be appropriate if he were an authority figure, not at all as a peer.
But my discussion with him was merely the catalyst for this post. I’ve been critical of the college housing methodology for years, especially since I taught on the collegiate level and counseled students who were in these situations and were getting no constructive help from those who had the authority to do more than offer a listening ear. It made little sense to me then, it makes even less sense to me now.
Of course you have an incentive to work things out with a roommate. You have the incentive of not wanting to live in a war zone, for the love of God. I, for one, consider not wanting to sleep under a study carrel a pretty good incentive for working things out before they get to that point. And living with a not-necessarily-compatible roommate really is good practice for sharing living quarters with loved ones who aren’t totally compatible.
The OP’s nephew and his roomie have different schedules. Big, hairy deal. So do my husband and I. I work nights, and he works days on a schedule that changes every month. We never had the same schedules as our dorm-mates, though, so we learned to deal with that a long time ago. Same for different eating preferences, hobbies, and levels of cleanliness and all the other little differences that couples tend to have. It’s eliminated a lot of little, petty conflicts from our marriage and made the transition smoother than it was for our friends who’d never had roommates.
My first roomie was a troll. Not in the MB sense, but in the sense that she was an evil little person who couldn’t stand sunlight. She could have saved a lot of money on housing by just finding a nice bridge to live under and some billy goats to eat. She hung up on people who called for me when I wasn’t in. She kept the television blazing and blaring until all hours of the night, but bitched when I opened the blinds so I could watch the sun rise as I dressed. She slept with the remote control at night and hid it when she wasn’t home so I couldn’t use it. She poured unfinished Diet Cokes on the carpet rather than walking down the hall to pour them down the sink, and she ate things off our nasty hairy carpet.
And yet, despite all this (and the fact that I did little things to drive her crazy like moving the television half an inch to the right; she had undiagnosed OCD) we managed to live pretty peacefully. We had conflicts and problems, but we bloody well dealt with it so we could have a reasonably agreeable place in which to live.
There are exactly two people in the entire world that I can share a room with without going nuts. Unfortunately, one of them was the only person I had roomed with before deciding not to try for one of the few singles when starting my freshman year. I would have been so much happier with a tiny room just barely big enough for my clothes and my bed, as long as I could be ALONE sometimes. It’s not that my roommate was so awful - she’s a nice girl, we’re both CS majors, she didn’t sexile me every weekend or anything - but I NEED my alone time.
Fortunately, the combination of my wonderful housing lottery luck and Qadgop and Mrs. Mercotan’s generosity mean that I have an amazing apartment this year, all to myself. And my friend, the one I can bear living with… she decided that she needed a roommate her first year, too. Right now, she can’t stand being around her roommate for more than an hour at a stretch. I told her, but noooo.
For my first two years at uni, I attended a school (UTDallas) that didn’t even have dorms, but on-campus apartments, that nobody was required to live in (even though I did, for lack of anyplace better to stay). For this I shall be thankfull every day of my life, as if I had been stuck in a tenement block like some of you were for two years, there is a very good chance I would have pulled a Charles Whitman at some point (yes, I like my space). Luckily, my first year there, my roommate was never home, and my second year I shared an apartment with two friends, and we all had our own rooms, so it wasn’t too bad. Whoever first came up with the idea of mandatory dormitory housing should be locked in a vault with a troop of baboons for four years.
Dorms do, sometimes, create community on campus. (At my school, some dorms have a reputation for being totally anti-social, with people who just don’t interact with each other.) They also keep too many of the students from taking up housing space in the community/college town, which I bet would draw complaints from the townspeople.
If you can commute, they rarely force you. This is NOT something 100% of schools do. Some, especially those in large cities, have no dorms at all. At my school, you won’t necessarily have a roommate even if you stay in a dorm, so I’m sure that’s true elsewhere. That’s probably not common for freshmen, but it happens. And again, usually the schools don’t want you to stay there for more than a year. While it inspires trepidation because of all the things that can go wrong, it doesn’t seem unusual or weird to an American.
Well, Spoons, YMMV. I think it also depends on the commute. I had one friend in college who grew up really close to campus, and he thought it was great to live at home (he didn’t live there all four years, though.) On the other hand, the friends I had who commuted from my home town (about 25 miles from campus) really did feel left out. Of course, a good part of their day was spent in traffic or on the bus–after studying and classes, it didn’t leave much time for a social life.
Many people commuted to my school, and many of those commuters treated the place like a job…they showed up for classes, but didn’t tend to participate in clubs and other “after hours” activities the way that dorm students and students in nearby off-campus apartments did. That’s why our school was doing so much to encourage freshmen to live on-campus–so that they would have the chance to get involved with campus life. I’m not saying that commuter students can’t get involved, but I do think it is more of a challenge for them.
