I recently committed to the University of Rochester! It has been so nice to be committed after a college process that has lasted for 2 years. Soon after I was admitted to the school, I was reminded that I would need to find a roommate. As a notoriously terrible responder, I knew that it would be a bit of a challenge to find one. After my older sister ended up with quite an interesting roommate this past year, I decided to brave the wild western frontier of the internet AKA Facebook to find a roommate.
The first challenge I encountered was trying to formulate my Facebook bio. Choosing the right collection of photos proved to be the most difficult part of my week. Facebook groups are like Tinder for 17-year-olds. People take 5 seconds to look at your photos, judge you, and move on. Creating the right “vibe” (as cringe as that is to say) is crucial. When looking at other people’s posts to get inspiration, I began to get some ideas of what I wanted my bio to look like. The primary photo should be a photo of just you, photos with friends can come later. The people that I thought were the most approachable seemed to have casual photos of themself (preferably not selfies) like a senior photo. Other good photos seemed to be photos with friends, ones that displayed their interests and photos of their pets, and maybe a selfie.
I thought that 6-8 photos would be enough to give people a sense of who I was without seeming a bit too excited. I posted 1 photo of myself, 2 that showcased the activities I was involved in high school, and 4 photos with my friends. My bio was pretty easy to write, most people follow a formula so I just copied everyone else 🙂
^these were the photos that I used!
Now that my bio was on the feed, I began searching for people that I might want to reach out to. I quickly compiled a list of red flags.
- People that are introverts. I am an introvert myself, so I wanted to room with an extrovert who would encourage me to get out of my comfort zone.
- People who were recruited to play sports. I skipped out on these people because I didn’t want to be woken up at 5 AM by my varsity track roommate going on a run. They will also spend a lot of time with their teammates, so they will not have a lot of free time to hang out with me 🙁
- Sorority gals. “I am planning on rushing” was an automatic pass
- Morning people. In my Pinterest “that girl” dreams I would wake up at 5 AM and make my green smoothie, but that’s just not me. For the sake of my own sanity, I passed on morning people.
After I posted my bio, a number of people reached out to me, one of whom would turn out to be my roommate. I found that responding in a timely manner was really helpful to keep the conversation going. Making sure to ask a lot of questions was also really important! I had one conversation where I was the one asking all the questions and it fizzled out really quickly because she kept responding with really dry answers.
Another thing that was good to do before committing to a roommate was to Facetime them to get to know them better. People can seem compatible over text, but face-to-face interaction is very different. I Facetimed my potential roommate and we really vibed so I felt really confident in my roommate decision, but it might not work out like that. Definitely facetime your roommate option or meet up in person if you live near each other!
Those are my tips for finding a roommate. Good luck!