<p>Did your USC student pick their roommate through personal choice (friend or aquantance) Uchoose or Facebook? How was the outcome??</p>
<p>I personally last year picked through Facebook, it wasnt terrible but it wasnt the best way to go through with it</p>
<p>JRWriter, what do you think would have been a better way to pick a roommate?</p>
<p>S was supposed to room with someone he met through UChoose freshman year but they missed the deadline. They wound up in the same dorm however and are still friends three years later. He wound up with a random roommate assignment which worked out fine. For what its worth, his current off campus roommates are boys he met in that same dorm freshman year.</p>
<p>Do you have any sense if it helps or hurts to request a specific roommate in terms of getting first choice housing?</p>
<p>It seems it would further complicate things if the student has a housing choice that requires an application (for example, Preston or learning community type housing).</p>
<p>Due to a late housing registration, my D had a random roomate assiged for South Tower freshman year. She looked her up on myspace and they had a few email and phone conversations that went really badly. D decided that she was not someone who she could live with easily, so she requested a move to a single room. It was the best decision D made. She had a lot more space, and since she was rushing, she knew she would meet people right away. The original roomate ended up on the same floor, and had a roomate who moved out after the first semester. </p>
<p>First semester this year D lived in the sorority house, and chose her roomate. This semester she is studying abroad in England, and will really appreciate the more modern accomadations when she returns to USC in the fall!! I think she is getting an apartment with some of her sorority sisters.</p>
<p>I assume then, if you put in a housing application (as an incoming freshman) and request a certain dorm, but do not select a roommate (through UChoose, Facebook etc.), would you then be placed in one of your listed dorms (hopefully, your 1st choice) and a random roommate assigned? Is there a benefit or edge in two kids listing each other as a roommates in a particular dorm and then getting their dorm of preference vs. not listing a roommate? Thanks.</p>
<p>S requested a dorm his freshman year (Capstone) but no roommate. He did get his first choice (Capstone, Columbia was his 2nd choice.) and a roommate was assigned at random. He looked up the roommate in the summer on VIP (they send you the phone # and address so you can get in touch.) They were both engineering majors and get along well.
Last year, 3 of them from Capstone requested each other and requested S. Quad for the 2nd year Capstone program. All requests were honored. </p>
<p>For this upcoming 09/10 year, the same 3 requested each other again as roommates, which was honored, but they got their third choice for dorm. (They all put the same dorm choices in the same order.)</p>
<p>So, this is just his experience…but it seemed for him that if you don’t request a roommate, your dorm request gets priority. If you do request a roommate(s), the roommate request gets priority over the dorm.</p>
<p>I called and found out that, at least for freshmen, if you have specified a roommate, your priority is based on the application date of the first roommate who signed up.</p>
<p>So if Joe signed up in February and then found a roommate in April, the pair would be placed based on the February application date and the dorm choices specified by Joe.</p>