<p>One can say the same thing about work commutes or arriving to complete commercial transactions with many buyers/sellers in a competitive frenzy. </p>
<p>However, in those situations, adults are expected to deal and manage if their arriving later than someone else means they lose out or worse, results in a negative performance review or even being fired from the job for chronic tardiness.</p>
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<p>Agree and this was exactly what I did when I arrived first. Then again, it wasn’t much of a sacrifice for me as I often only arrived with a large suitcase and a backpack. </p>
<p>In most cases, I had so much unused space in my portion of closetspace that I felt it was a waste not to allow my more laden down roommates to store their stuff there when their own closet spaces were inadequate.</p>
<p>It was also fortunate none of my roommates were the types to move stuff around the room during the semester/year. </p>
<p>Would have driven me nuts considering I tend to prefer to get everything related to moving in/organizing over with before start of fall semester classes. I know some people prefer moving stuff around throughout the semester/year…but I’ve also seen how that drove roommates who were like me up the wall.</p>
<p>I’m glad my kids had private bedrooms in 4 bedroom suites. You chose your actual bedroom when you reserved your room. so, when you arrive, you know that Bedroom A (or whatever) is yours, no matter when the others arrive.</p>
<p>but if my kids had to share a room and the roomies weren’t arriving around the same time, then pick a bed and then pick less desirable other things. don’t take all the best choices. That isn’t polite.</p>
<p>If the room has a symmetrical arrangement I hardly think it matters, but many rooms do have unequal arrangements. When my older son arrived at his freshman year room we waited for a while - then since only the closets were unequal and my son didn’t have much stuff he took a bed and took the obviously less good closet.</p>
<p>I much preferred the top bunk when I was a freshman. Luckily my roommate preferred the bottom bunk.</p>
<p>I really don’t like the “You snooze you lose attitude.” My son’s roommate came from one hour away, we came from four hours away. People coming on planes may have even fewer choices or may be staying in a hotel in town.</p>
<p>this doesn’t make any sense. Why doesn’t the first roommate just take the more desirable side if s/he was going to end up with it anyway? If the options are to take the side you want, or wait and hope the roommate has the same manners as you, the game theory choice is to take the side. And since you think the late arriving roommate would voluntarily take the inferior side, it serves no purpose to wait for them to arrive.</p>
<p>why should a lady get a young person’s seat? do you not think ladies are capable of standing on public transportation systems? sounds sexist.</p>
<p>DS’s school
Assigned regular move in day spots by the first letter of your last name…beginning at 8 in the morning. There is no way a roommate with a A last name was going to be there at the same time as a Z last name. </p>
<p>Both of my kiddos attended the orientation just prior to school starting. Their roommates didn’t arrive until at least three days later. It would have been tough to wait for the roommate to arrive to make choices. To be honest, there really wasn’t any difference in the bed/desk/closet choices. It wasn’t like camp where one person had the top bunk!</p>
<p>Yes, you were. I had one of those. She did it all the time. More than once, she did it while I was out and since I’m a night owl, I would come back after everyone was asleep and run into furniture in the dark. After I did that once, I stopped feeling too bad about turning on a desk lamp.</p>
<p>I arrived several days before my roommate (who missed orientation) and didn’t feel the slightest bit of regret for choosing my side of the room without consulting her.</p>
<p>Unless there are some unequal decisions to be made (e.g. top bunk/bottom bunk), I’d just pick a bed/desk/closet and start unpacking. It’s easy enough to move things from one closet to another later if necessary; unpacking from boxes or suitcases into the closet takes much longer.</p>
<p>^ My Mom called them “rules for life.” Conspicuously missing from the list were “do unto others and then cut out” and “the bleeding man beside the road probably deserved it, so walk on by.”</p>
<p>The problem with “you snooze, you lose” in a dorm situation is that the person you’ve triumphed over is going to be sharing your room with you for the next 9-10 months. They might also be the one with a printer you might want to borrow at 2 am when yours runs out of ink, or with the care package of homemade cookies. If you want to crow about “life lessons” in order to justify short-term gain, be prepared to receive a less-than-helpful response when you’d like to have lights-out earlier than 2 am. </p>
<p>There’s another life lesson about what goes around coming around.</p>
<p>Exactly right. Starting off on that foot will likely lead to a long, cold winter. </p>
<p>Plus, “you snooze, you lose” also implies that those who “lose” deserve to because of their own indolence or laziness. Very few new students or their parents are “snoozing” on Move-in Day. But many will arrive later in the day simply because they had to drive or fly from far away. “Snoozing” has very little to do with when you show up to claim your portion of the room.</p>
<p>To add to coureur, it’s unlikely that mos students decide when they leave the house. If it’s a plane the parents will buy the most economical ticket that will get them there within a reasonable time most likely. If they’re driving the parents are probably driving because most freshman can’t have a car on campus, so they may be ready to leave hours before their parents are in some cases. Not a parent but just a thought. In my opinion just be courteous, if it’s even unpack and offer to change if they don’t want to be near the door or something like that, if it’s very different then maybe call them if you have their number to discuss it. Starting off the year being nice just seems like the best way to go to me (I’m not a parent, sorry for barging in on the thread)</p>
<p>Maybe things are different with the current college-going population. However, back when I was in college in the mid-late '90s, it was commonly accepted at every campus I’ve visited/knew of that the first person to arrive had the first choice of bed, side, closets, etc and the common prevailing attitude among most classmates I knew of(mainly males) was to deal if arrangements cannot be renegotiated and make the best of it. </p>
<p>Moreover, on more mainstream campuses I’ve been to when visiting HS friends, the prevailing culture was such that any complaining by latecomers reflected badly on them as they were the ones who arrived late and the early arrivals cannot be expected to accommodate them…especially if they had to arrive several days earlier for some reason. </p>
<p>Personally, I arrived earlier than my roommate(s) freshman year, later than roommates sophomore year, and earlier first-half of junior year before lucking out with a single for my last 3 semesters. </p>
<p>In each case, the first arrivals got their choices for better or worse and the latecomers made the best of it and didn’t allow this to become a sore issue. </p>
<p>As for sharing stuff, we all shared what we had without holding any grudges about who got first dibs on bed/space. Granted, at my LAC…we were open to renegotiations and did compromise. </p>
<p>However, it never came up in my case due to my being accepting of my latecomer status when it applied and probably because I was more than happy to allow my roommates to share my portion of closet space when I was the first arrival because I often had far more closet space than I needed. That…and being the accessible academic tutor/computer techie. </p>
<p>Only listed issue I’ve ever had was having lights/noise continue past midnight as I usually had early morning classes. </p>
<p>Fortunately, the campus culture takes an extremely dim view of noise violations and inconsiderate students of that type…especially when it is preventing the other roommate/dormmates from studying/sleeping enough for morning classes. </p>
<p>A reason why the RA sympathized with me when I had to negotiate with a younger roommate to stop computer-gaming in our room past midnight as the noise was such that classmates from the adjacent dormroom would also complain about the noise. </p>
<ul>
<li>While expensive initially, that printer was built like a tank and each cartridge lasted me a decade of heavy use and is still ticking today…and only on the second cartridge. Considering the poor build quality, longevity, and expense of ink cartridges…glad I skipped out…especially after seeing how students/small businesses can go through 1 $30 ink cartridge/month in the late '90s.</li>
</ul>
<p>My D. will be arriving four days early, moving into her room, then leaving with the small group of freshmen who are going on the pre-orientation camping trip. She’ll spend the first night in her dorm room, and depart early the next morning. They won’t be back again until the night of move-in day, so I see no way around moving in “first.” Quite a few kids are meeting and choosing roommates online already, which would be nice for lots of reasons - one of them being discussing the move-in stuff beforehand.</p>
<p>And adding - the one thing that would be an issue for her would be a top bunk. She’s doesn’t like being up high, gets claustrophobic, and is already worried about it. May check with housing ahead of time to try to avoid that setup, but it seems to be pretty common.</p>
<p>I don’t really get the big deal. I work in residential programs and most of our doubles are identically set up. Only in a very few situations is one side of the room clearly worse than the other, and usually that’s based on arbitrary preferences. My freshman year, our room was set up as mirror images but one bed was near the window whereas the other was near the door. The window was the “more desirable” location, but in all honesty it really did not matter. My roommate arrived first, so she got that bad and the desk and closet that were closest to it. I probably would’ve preferred the window bed/desk/closet had I gotten there first, but the furniture was identical and the location didn’t really matter in a room that was at best 200 square feet. It didn’t hinder my enjoyment of my first year at all.</p>
<p>I can’t imagine arguing about this on the first day…this is a chance for your new college student to show that he or she is an adult. On the one hand, I think that the roommate who gets there first should choose first - why should she wait around for hours to unpack her stuff? That would’ve driven me crazy. On the other hand, she should probably be gracious if there is an opportunity to. Sometimes it makes sense to pick the best bed and then the least desirable desk location, for example, but other times it doesn’t (like if the best bed is closest to the best desk and best closet - they’re all on the same side of the room).</p>
<p>Also, location doesn’t necessarily determine who gets there first. I was coming 20 miles away and my roommate was coming 800 miles away. She just got there first.</p>
<p>Honestly, this seems like such a petty thing to fight over, unless there are some clear and present differences (with top v. bottom bunk, for example).</p>