Blind or Find?: Staffers debate on how college roommates should be decided, either by choosing them or by random assignment

By Mia Vogel

Meeting people online has always seemed sketchy to me, but after spending the past few months browsing through Class of 2027 Instagram pages for potential roommates and friends, I think I may have a knack for it. 

With everything from scholarships to the number of Starbucks on campus swirling around my brain when making my final college decisions, housing ranks high on the priorities list. 

I’ve been assured by older friends that as long as I go in with an optimistic outlook I’ll thrive in any living arrangement, no matter the roommate. After all, it’s only for a year. 

However, when allotted the luxury of choice, why pass it up? 

How could a 20-question form possibly match me to someone I have to live in a 200-square foot room with for nine months? Through social media, you can actually talk and get to know each other much more thoroughly.

Call me picky, but my future roommate needs to have good taste in music, a healthy dose of clean freak in her and impeccable style — so we can share clothes, obviously. There’s no chance that a randomly assigned roommate could check all my endless niche boxes. 

By this point in the year, almost every school has an Instagram account for their incoming freshman class. These accounts serve as a platform for future and potential students to get an idea of their class’s energy, make friends and, most importantly — find roommates. 

The only downside is that it’s tough to find a roommate when you haven’t fully decided on a school — no one wants to commit to room with someone who’s still 50/50 on whether they’ll even be attending the school. 

Without fail, every time I scroll through the endless feed of lively photos and voicey captions I find at least a handful of girls who I can see myself rooming with — and just as many who I’d never, which is why I can’t risk a random assignment. 

The reality is that for every random roommate success story I’ve heard, there’s a slew of horror stories to level it. Everything from obnoxious 4 a.m. gym wake-up alarms to semesters gone without washing sheets and — in my mom’s case — a roommate who left a week into freshman year to go follow the Grateful Dead on tour, has convinced me that the folks at the university housing departments are by no means matchmakers. 

I’ll be choosing my own roomate, thank you very much.

By Caroline Wood

Swiping through the hundreds of Homecoming group photos, mirror selfies and senior pictures on the @miz_2027 Instagram account, I’m overwhelmed. How am I supposed to determine girls’ entire personalities from eight smiley photos and a 50-word caption about how they like “going out” and “hanging with friends?”

I could spend my last semester of high school stressing about speed dating these girls searching for my perfect match, but I’d rather put my energy towards scholarships and program applications and take the chance with a random roommate.

Sure, it could be a potential disaster come move-in day, but getting a random roommate could actually be the safer and less stressful route, plus I don’t have dangerously high expectations. 

After finding someone on Instagram, Snapchatting and meeting for coffee, you think you’ve finally found the one. You pop the question — “Will you be my roomie?” So much work was put into finding this person and now you’ll start off college with a built-in, sifted-out bestie…in theory.

But living with someone is hard. For seniors who have only ever lived with their families, it can be a difficult adjustment. The added expectation that we’ll be best friends based on our shared love of “traveling” and “listening to music” could make an already pressured position worse. What do you say to your chosen roomie if you don’t like who they hang out with or you have different interpretations of what “going out” entails?

If you get randomly paired with someone and you find you’d rather not hang out with them outside the dorm, that’s okay. You’ll just be people who live together.

It’s not like random roommates are a total shot in the dark anyways — a lot of dorms have questionnaires to help pair you to someone with similar schedules and hobbies.

I can understand trying to build this bond if you’re headed out of state and don’t know anyone. But since I’ve committed to Mizzou where I’ll know people from East, I don’t need to find a starter friend going into college. I’ll see how things go with my roommate and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll still have friends.

My biggest fear is hating them. Something as simple as living in a constant mess could dampen the start of my college experience, but a chosen roommate has the same odds of failure. After all, no one’s going to add “I don’t use headphones when watching midnight TikToks” or “I wake up at the crack of dawn to do yoga” to their Instagram caption.

Plus it’s only freshman year. And if we truly cannot stand to be around each other, I’ll just switch roommates at semester. While the suspense of who my soon-to-be roommate will be is a bit stressful, I’m so excited to see who fate pairs me with to either potentially make a lasting friendship or have a funny story to laugh about one day.