Housing manager offers advice on roommates

Living with a roommate can be a tough proposition, especially if you’re new to sharing a living space with someone else.

The State News sat down with Tim Knight, housing manager of Brody Complex, to talk about the different issues that arise when living with a roommate.

State News: How do you go about putting people together as roommates?

Tim Knight: You have to look first at living options: Are you in R.O.S.E.S. (Residential Option for Science and Engineering), do we say that we smoke or don’t smoke, do we want an alcohol-free environment or quiet floor? Ideally, we put freshmen with freshmen or freshmen with sophomores. If you start getting into juniors and seniors, there’s too big of a gap. You start getting late admits toward the end of the year and you start looking for space to put them, and they may not be ideal. The people here, though, do an awful lot of juggling to try and hit those bearings.

SN: What are some of the weirdest incidents you’ve dealt with?

TK: We’ve had born-again Christians with Wiccan roommates. You’re set up with a bit of religious conflict. That’s probably the most unusual thing. It doesn’t happen very often. I think by and large a portion of the conflicts come out because parents think there’s a conflict or because lifestyles are dramatically different.

SN: What’s the best way to approach the roommate situation if you go in blind?

TK: Going in blind usually means a better chance of success with your roommate than coming in with a high school buddy. A good percentage of the conflicts that I’ve heard have come from people who are rooming with their best buddy since second grade and they believe they know this person very, very well and then they find out what it’s like to live with them. People who go in blind have to get to know someone so there aren’t any preconceived notions.

SN: What’s the protocol for having friends over?

TK: We all have friends over from time to time and generally, they do it on our time frame. Ultimately you have the ability to say no, especially to an overnight guest because after all, the roommate’s permission is required. Conflict arises when you’re only thinking of your time frame and what you want and you’re not thinking that someone else is living in that space.

SN: What’s the best way to deal with an argument you’ve had with a roommate?

TK: Cool off for one thing. Do not start engaging in the silent treatment. We now have people, sadly, who are sitting in the same room, practically with the backs of their chairs touching, IMing each other instead of simply turning around and saying “Let’s see if we can’t solve this.” Most of us first take the fact that the person who’s disagreeing with us has attacked us, so we get defensive.

SN: Should you make an effort to do things with your roommate?

TK: Yeah. Think about things you talk about with your friends. A lot of them are shared experiences and that’s where you get to really know each other. We might go to hear the same band and you love them and I hate them, but we have a shared experience and we can talk about what we like and don’t like. If you’re going to be sharing a space, you need to discover what the commonalties are. One way to do that is to do things together.

SN: Name the three most important things for having a good roommate experience.

TK: Remember you are not the only person in the universe. It’s not all about you. Understand that you will change. You may retain your basic core values, but the fact that you were a day person in high school and you were in bed by 11 p.m. every night may change. You may hear ideas and beliefs that are significantly different than your own, and you can’t automatically shut them out. That’s one of the reasons you come to a university is to experience things beyond your own little world.

Compiled by James Andersen

Published on Sunday, September 30, 2007