You don't have to be best friends with your roommate. Although it's obviously best to be on good terms with your roommate, you don't need to be together all time and be best friends; often, roommates aren't best friends, but that's okay. As long as you both know how other wants to be treated and respects that, your success at living together will be greatly increased.

It's important to be tolerant of your roommate. You'll meet people at MSSM from many backgrounds, including different races, religions, and sexual orientations. It is extremely important for you to be open-minded and honest when discussing and dealing with issues, especially with your roommate.

Ask questions, be open

Try to set aside stereotypes

Listen to your roommate!

Conflict resolution

It's pretty likely that you'll have at least one conflict with your roommate, in all honesty. The magnitude of conflict will vary, but here are some ideas to help you in any situation:

Address problem or issue immediately!

Listen to your roommate's views

Don't wait for your roommate to say something about what's bothering you

Negotiate, be flexible.

Bring your RA or Residential director into discussion if you can't resolve problem.

dan the roommate man

We soon had whole colonies of flies and roaches living in our room, scurrying around like they owned place. Being too lazy to kill them, we had a rule that they would be eliminated only if they crawled on us while we were awake. Barring that they were free to do as they pleased.

One night after way too many beers I decided that walking across hall to bathroom was too much work so I opened door and peed out into carpeted hallway. This became a nightly ritual.

I think that twice a month exterminator would go from room to room spraying for bugs. When he came to our room he would key in, look around, and walk out. I guess he figured it was of no use even trying.

The funny thing was that very few people knew we lived like this. We were both preppy, clean-cut fraternity guys. All parties were at house so nobody ever came to visit. Having females over was out of question but there were ways to work around that.

Towards end of semester word began to get out and we realized that while people were laughing eventually somebody in Housing was going to get upset. We were concerned too about leaving it over Christmas break. Who knew what would grow in there while we were gone? The trash was thigh-high and walking around in room was nearly impossible.

It took us a solid day and a half to clean that ten by fifteen foot room. The next semester was pretty bad but it never go like it did before. The next year we moved into fraternity house and had different roommates, so we were never able to combine forces again. But for that one year we really were worst roommates ever.

dan the roommate man