So we’ve talked the roommate talk quite a bit here at Wesleying. The chances of you not getting along with your freshman co-habitant are kinda high, sorry (but the chances of you loving them are also high, so woo!?).
But at some college across the country, they’ve turned what Wesleyan does pretty arbitrarily into a pseudo-science…by outsourcing it.
From the NYtimes:
WebRoomz, which fills beds at 20 universities, offers a customizable questionnaire of up to 130 items covering eating habits, social behavior and musical tastes. Such questions, it says, reduce room-change requests by 68 percent the first year.
Colleges have also set up special Web pages so newly accepted students can make connections over the summer. Roughly 10 percent of freshmen at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt., have circumvented its residential life office and found their own roommates on the college’s message board. “It’s kind of like dating; I wasn’t really looking, but when I met her I knew she was the perfect roommate,” says Caitlin Patey, of Kennebunk, Me., who will room this fall with another design-obsessed video-gamer, Kerri Donahue of Connecticut. They met on Champlain’s site.
Nytimes also included what a webroomz sample questionnaire would have looked like:
I don’t know how this would help anyone at Wesleyan.
- There should definitely be a question about sexual orientation. That just goes without saying.
- “Do you date” should be replaced with, “How many nights a month should your roommate expect to be sexiled?”
- Personalties should include “Hipster,” “Vegan,” and “A capella”
- Hobbies should include “Dungeons and Dragons,” “Irony,” and “Facebook.”
- Adding question “Do you get post-modernism?” would so own this survey.