Resident Life is considering moving the roommate selection process online to help students use more detailed and relevant criteria to pick who they live with.

The new process would ideally involve the creation of a social networking site similar to Facebook, according to members of Resident Life Advisory Team, the Residence Hall Association committee that advises the Department of Resident Life. Both incoming freshmen and enrolled students could create a profile on the site and answer questions about their habits and hobbies. Students would then look at other profiles and choose roommates. The system could possibly also include an application similar to Facebook’s friend suggestions, where the university could match roommates based on their profiles.

“We felt that students were already getting together on Facebook and other universities have gotten students together online,” said ReLATe chairman and junior biological sciences major Spiro Dimakas. “It would be a great way to keep the university involved and find roommates because some of the only times to do that are accepted student days and orientations.”

But Resident Life Assignments Manager Erin Iverson said there may still be difficulties with trying to create a completely new system.

“The most important component is understanding where students are coming from,” Iverson said. “But we’d be reprogramming how the whole roommate contract is created and managed in the database and we’d have to be able to translate that to fit the new system.”

North Hill RHA Senator Daniel Davis, a freshman psychology major, said a university-controlled online system would lead to students being more open about their habits than on a questionnaire and – unlike Facebook – would only contain relevant information.

“If we created a system through the university, then it would be much more controlled, whereas on Facebook people have free reign over what to put on their profiles,” said North Hill Senator Daniel Davis, a freshman psychology major. “People would be more honest.”

As it exists today, the roommate matching process is based on a five-question survey created by Resident Life that asks about students’ sleep patterns, cleanliness and other factors. The department then goes through them by hand and matches students with others who gave similar answers. But the only possible answer to the questions the form asks are ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ leaving little room for those who may have varying habits.

ReLATe members hoped to change the process to make the questions and answers more precise about both students’ own habits and what they want in a roommate. They suggested making a sliding scale where students would could rate their own cleanliness or smoking habits. Committee members said factors like neatness, for example, can be hard to measure in such black or white terminology.

Additionally, people’s habits often change once they come to college, making it more difficult for incoming freshmen to say how often they will study in their room or how late they plan to stay up, ReLATe members said.

But Iverson said having so many variables could make it challenging to match roommates without overhauling the entire system which could include rating categories based on importance. For example, she said, if a student said they smoke ‘sometimes,’ would it be best to match them with someone who smokes frequently or with someone who never smokes?

Regardless of what happens with the questionnaires, the process is dependent on students being honest about their habits, which is sometimes not the case.

Sophomore marketing major Lindsay Lustig ended up asking to be reassigned in the middle of her freshman year because of problems with her roommates.

“Some people lie on those questionnaires,” she said. “[In my first room], one of my roommates lied and said she didn’t smoke because [her parents were watching her fill out the form].

“It would make the process easier and better if it was like Facebook, but you still won’t always find the perfect roommate,” Lustig added. “I had better luck the next time and became friends with my new roommate.”

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