Photo: Scorbette37
Stanford University is unique in the way they handle freshman rooming assignments. Freshmen aren’t allowed to choose who they want to live with, nor are they even told their assignment until they show up for the first day of orientation. Even if you and your best friend were lucky enough to get into Stanford, you certainly won’t be living with him freshman year.
The new students show up at the dorm the first day of orientation not even knowing their roommate’s name. No preconceived judging can take place, even in this Facebook world we live in. But that certainly doesn’t mean no one knows them – the entire dorm staff is required to memorize all the student’s names before they even show up. The students are greeted with enthusiastic personal cheers from a dozen people.
To make this process even more interesting – all the freshman roommate assignments are done by hand. Unlike other schools, no computer algorithm is used to quickly make assignments. Rather, two current students spend all summer playing matchmaker. The process has been subject to many rumors, but a recent Stanford News article helped shed some light:
- A computer algorithm is used to place students in dorms across the campus. This is done automatically so that they can balance out many different factors: racial diversity, male/female ratio, housing preference of freshman (four class vs. all freshman, shared gender floors or not), spreading out varsity sport teammates, spreading out students from the same high school, and more.
- Once the students are placed in a dorm, the new student is notified. They will not find out any more information until day one of new student orientation.
- Over the summer the actual roommate pairings are made. The summer job for two current students is to go through all the data available on the new students, pair them up, and place them in a specific room.
- All new students fill out a short questionnaire with information about their living habits. How late do they stay up? How messy are they? How social? Music preference? And a short essay about their living style. This information plus the students’ full application are used in the process.
- What do they look for? Well it isn’t an exact science, hence why it is still done by hand. “They have to have similar bedtimes and similar social and cleanliness levels just so they want the same thing out of their room. After that, it’s a balance between making sure they have something in common that they can bond over and making sure they’re different and can learn from each other.”
- They put quieter students next to the Resident Fellow’s room and social people on the outside of the hallways so that when they walk to the bathroom in the center of the hall, they’ll stop and talk along the way.
- Roommates every year will try to figure out exactly why they were placed together. Was there a good reason? Was it something hidden deep within their application? What do they expect us to bond over?
- “Every year, rumors abound of roommates who have been paired for obscure, often hilarious reasons. A Thomas Jefferson paired with a George Washington. Roommates named Wolfe and Lamb. A student with the last name Arroyo living in Arroyo dorm. An entire quad of Johns. Yet according to Davidson and Miller, such conspiracy theories are unfounded.” These rumors circulate around campus and no one knows how valid they are. Do they actually happen? Is it a crazy coincidence or something the matchmakers do for a little fun? According to one of last year’s matchmakers, “we rarely even look at the names. There’s not really time.” And you expect me to believe that? There had to be one day over the summer where they are just looking for a little entertainment. If not that guy, some previous year.
And now, a baby monkey riding a pig (be sure to have your sound on):