At the conclusion of this collegiate year, the following question is bound to arise: “What are you doing this summer?”
Some work at summer camps. Some move furniture. Amy Gauthier, the Director of Residential Education and Living (REAL), spends her summers with 500 freshmen housing forms.
In a world where computers dominate, this roommate matchmaker is in her profession’s minority. Most colleges run survey responses through computer programs and some even have their incoming students build Facebook-like profiles and find matches themselves. While each approach has found success, there is something charming about hand-selections, human-influence, and an office floor of papers spread about, as though two children are preparing to embark on a game of memory.
Each “first year,” as Gauthier calls them, fills out a student housing form soon after choosing to enroll at the college. The form asks for answers to college-application favorites like “This is how I describe myself:” and “My friends describe me as:”
The most helpful question, however, was a new addition to the form that was mailed to the class of 2013. Verbatim, it reads, “What else do we need to know about you when making your housing assignment?” According to Gauthier, this is how she and her team learn the much-needed specifics. “I have to live with someone who likes Twilight,” one answer might read, or “I’ve had bunk-beds my whole life and am ready for a change.” Leaving parts of the form blank tells the Office of Residential Education and Living, “I don’t care, just give me a bed.”
Gauthier’s first move in the roommate selection process is to reserve rooms for incoming freshmen, preventing double-loving upperclassman from snagging rooms in the Windham basement come the annual housing lottery. Next, she waits for word of who has enrolled in Residential Seminars; this is the reason incoming freshman don’t receive room assignments until late summer. Finally, the pairing begins. For Conn freshmen, it is still boys with boys, girls with girls. Those who checked the box that they are “early to bed, early to rise” are matched with other similarly diurnal newcomers to Conn.
Other variables do not breed such roommate synergy; tennis players dorm with actors, and Floridians share cozy 11’ by 12’ domestic cubes with New Yorkers. The matchmakers do their best to pair freshmen with differing home states. REAL Office associates avoid clustering athletes together.
Gauthier notes that campus exploration is important. “Our campus is small enough that you can make friends outside your house.” Diversity is key to placing roommates. It is a way to expand one’s horizons.
But what about that freshman quad of four Sarahs or the double with two Mikes? “We don’t pay attention to names,” says Gauthier. “Not really.”
In her first years as Director, Amy Gauthier stayed up nights worrying about potential pairing outcomes: feuds, and sexiling. But with experience comes knowledge, and it was learned that freshman roommate situations are generally, at worst, the makings of good upperclassmen stories.
Gauthier added, “We do the best we can.”
“We aren’t trying to pair future best friends,” says Gauthier. “We just want people to be able to live together in peace.”
