<p>i will be a freshman at university at buffalo this fall. yesterday i received my room assignment and i've been placed in a single. on the positive side i made it into the fyi health floor. but when i requested my top six room choices none of them were a single, actually three of my top choices were quads. i'm the type of person that always likes to be around people, and i find it hard to be alone for any long periods of time. however, if i request a change 1. they won't be able to do anything about i before the fall semester starts and 2. i will almost certainly loose my spot on the fyi health floor. just wondering what your thoughts on single rooms were, and whether or not i should just stick with my room assignment. </p>
<p>positives of a single: can have own fridge and tv, control your own sleep schedule, can get quality study time, stay on fyi health floor</p>
<p>negatives of a single: might miss out on true college experience?</p>
<p>Most people (except for you and my college student son) would prefer singles, so if you’d rather have a roommate ask the college if you can have a roommate on the health floor. If that’s not possible, I’m sure that once school starts, you’ll find someone on that floor who’ll eagerly trade with you. </p>
<p>The true college experience you’ll miss out on are all of the big and small hassles that even roommates who get along well get into.</p>
<p>You can still have plenty of friends and company in a single. Keep your door open when you’re in there, and have plenty of snacks available. Students will come and hang out with you including some who wish to get away from their roommates.</p>
<p>Wow, someone else on this forum lives/will be living in Western NY haha. Yeah, I mean if you’re not paying extra for the single, why not keep it? You can meet others on your floor and keep your door open. You can go around the floor and introduce yourself to people… You won’t have to worry about your roommate not letting you do stuff, like having friends over to watch a movie, or having guests from outside the college, or whatever you might do that might annoy someone else. Embrace the situation.</p>
<p>I specifically requested a double with roommate for my freshman year, and my roommate ended up as one of my closest friends. Do I think that having a roommate is part of a “true college experience” (whatever that means)? Well, yes and no. There are obvious benefits to having a single, but I think that living with a good roommate is something you should try at some point. If it’s anything like mine, that experience can be very educational in a number of ways. </p>
<p>For now, I wouldn’t worry too much about living in a single for freshman year. You could have dodged a bullet (bad roommate), and if anything, it will give you time to make friends and see if they might be compatible people to live with in later years.</p>
<p>I really think you should keep it. If you get lonely you can always leave your room. When you have a roommate, you don’t have control over your socializing and will be constantly stuck around someone that you may not even get along with. You take for granted things like private phone conversations and midday naps until you have a roommate and those things are pretty much impossible.</p>
<p>I mean, I didn’t mind sharing a room with someone else, but at times I felt restricted. I don’t feel comfortable doing certain things when another person was in the room – even in terms of what time I could go to sleep. I had to FORCE myself to go to sleep early. </p>
<p>So yeah, the whole making friends thing? You have clubs, classes, just hanging around campus. Plus, you can still make friends with people in your dorm by saying hi and making small talk when walking through the hallways. So…</p>
<p>Roommates suck. For the most part. There are some success stories, but you’ll want the privacy. Just leave your door open. Single’s are fantastic. I had one when I lived in the house. It’s nice being able to be naked in your room for as long as you want. Then again, having a double never stopped my roommate from doing so…</p>
<p>My roommate is still one of my best friends, but I’m thoroughly glad that our housing lottery put me in a single instead. Her napping habits bothered me to no end–I felt bad about going in my own room, even though it was in the middle of the day between lunch and my next class. I loved talking to her at night, but the same thing could be accomplished as going across the hall/next door.</p>
<p>The only problem I could forsee is that you don’t have someone accountable for you if you like to go out. Our group would inevitably get split up throughout the night so we’d wait in my (our) room to make sure that the other returned safely before we went back to bed. But then again, you can still have that kind of thing with a hallmate, so there’s probably no reason to worry.</p>
<p>The girl next door to us ended up with a single (after requesting a random roommate), and she was in our room enough to where a few people thought that she was our third roommate. You’ll be fine, I promise.</p>
<p>Think about it this way, you live in a house with your family but do you want to share a room with them? Probably not. So having a roommate can be fun(or really, really not fun) but not having one means you just get a little more privacy. Stay on the health floor, keep your single(cherish it for when you need to do major studying) and remember, your social life is just on the other side of that door and they don’t care to see you sleep.</p>
<p>I’m a Mom–I’m with most of the others—count your blessings. I had a weird roommate my freshman year, then she had a breakdown shortly after Christmas. I wound up with a single the rest of the year. It was great – my friends came there to escape their own weird roommates or to have a place to be when their roomie had a bf in. But I also had peace & quiet when I needed it, to work. </p>
<p>Get a folding chair for hanging out, and as that other Mom said, have snacks available. Leave your door open & someone will always be popping in. </p>
<p>You are not really going to “miss out” on the college experience – this is just another one of many—you have three more years to have roommates, and you will be able to chose them. Enjoy!</p>