Along with  parties, class selections and the prospect of new friendships, roommates are often the most anticipated part of a college freshman’s first fall on campus. For many students, sharing a living space the size of a large changing room with a random stranger is a new experience, one that can either forge a lifelong friendship or completely mar all memories of that crucial first year.

Some Brown students, for example, boast freshman year roommates right out of a National Lampoon movie.  “He asked me to remind him to shower, otherwise he said he would forget,” says one senior. “It smelled so bad my eyes would water when I walked in. He also left empty soda bottles on my side of the room.”

One sophomore recalls a particularly awkward encounter with his former roommate after he returned from a weekend with his parents. “I came into the room and there was this puddle under my desk. When I went to put a paper towel on it, it turned yellow,” he says. “I asked my roommate, ‘Who peed under my desk?’ and all he would say was that it wasn’t him.”  The sophomore described this incident as the last straw in their already rocky relationship, and he moved in with a friend a few weeks later.

Diversity is touted as an important feature of the college experience, especially at a school like Brown.  It is also a key argument in defense of random roommate assignment: living with someone of a different culture or background will teach students to appreciate another lifestyle.  But living with a person raised with different values is not always a positive experience.

For one sophomore girl, “Louisa,” it was difficult to adjust to living with her roommate, who came from an affluent background and was used to being waited on at home. The well-heeled roommate asked Louisa to complete tasks for her that she could easily perform herself, such as taking out her trash or closing her window while she was sitting nearby at her desk, but their issues ran deeper than these few isolated conflicts.

“Our personalities just clashed,” she said. “She is very superficial and cares a lot about what people think of her. She was going on a date and asked to borrow my necklace. But then she wouldn’t wear it because it was from Forever 21, and too cheap to wear when she was trying to impress someone.”

While the pair was able to resolve the room issues, such as cleaning up messes, the personality problems never went away. “It’s fine for us to be friends but not roommates,” she says. “It’s really sad because we could have been better friends if we weren’t roommates.”

While the roommate contract Brown requires its freshman roommate pairs to draw up is designed to generate discussion to prevent these kinds of problems, the student says that there was “just no getting through” to her roommate.  Even after she asked her parents for conflict-resolution tips, their personalities proved too different to overcome their differences.

But Brown and ResLife staff believe that there “are both benefits and challenges of living with someone different,” and that by choosing or ‘customizing’ one’s own roommate (as is procedure at many others universities), students miss out on an important growth experience. According to Natalie Basil, the Associate Director of ResLife at Brown, working out compromises with someone with different values helps students develop communication and problem-solving skills, both of which serve them well in facing future conflicts.

But with studies showing that roommate conflicts can often lead to a lower G.PA. and a negative outlook on a student’s first year of college, is it more important to take steps to ensure that roommates get along?

Other universities are now taking measures to ensure that among the inevitable challenges freshmen face, a troublesome roommate will not be one of them.  Though most of these schools once matched roommates with a simple questionnaire like the one Brown still employs, many of their new measures elevate roommate pairing to an art. At Davidson College in Davidson, N.C., compatible personalities are matched through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test. And in the 1990s, the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) developed a system where, instead of answering the typical behavior questions, incoming freshmen provide their reactions to a series of hypothetical scenarios. Other schools, such as Pepperdine and Widener University allow students to choose their own roommates or find them through Facebook.

But does all this planning really prevent conflict?

Basil does not think students should be allowed to choose their own roommates, and said that no matter how detailed the questionnaire or the personality test, it can only reveal so much about someone’s true behavior.

“Sometimes students fill it out based on who they would like to be, instead of who they are. And sometimes parents fill out the questionnaire,” she says.  She believes students often change when they get to college, so that a roommate pair that may have seemed compatible on the Internet does not actually work in a dorm room.

In contrast to the elaborate processes at some schools, Brown’s roommate assignments are decided solely on students’ answers to three questions: What time to you get up in the morning and go to bed at night? Do you study with or without music? And, are you a smoker or not? A computer automatically puts people together based on their answers. Though students must also rank themselves from one to five on a scale of cleanliness, this question does not actually factor much into the final pairings.

“Because cleanliness is so subjective, it is difficult to match. I’ve found cleanliness issues can be resolved. It’s harder to work out sleeping patterns,” Basil says. She finds that instead of a personality test, the roommate contract is the key to a successful dorm experience.

Meant to further facilitate the roommate experience, student RCs, MPCs and WPCs must complete a training program in solving conflicts. But many students are hesitant to take their problems to them out of fear of hurting their roommate’s feelings, or are reluctant to drag a conflict out into the open that stems from a simple difference in personalities. ResLife has seen many roommate rows through the years, and allows reassignment for worst case scenarios, but the process often takes time to complete.

“ResLife wasn’t helpful at all. They left it up to me to find someone to switch with,” said one sophomore who was unhappy with his roommate freshman year. “After a semester of pressure they finally gave me someone’s number who lived down the hall.”

According to a 2009 Communication study at Minnesota State University, when the University of Nevada Las Vegas changed its questionnaire in the 1990s, their requests for roommate changes dropped 50%, and have remained around that number ever since. If Brown ResLife’s lax policies concerning roommate switches allow dissatisfied freshmen to switch roommates, why not improve the pairing process to begin with?

Despite the studies, Basil said she has seen no correlation between roommate conflicts and low G.P.As. And sometimes, though a tried and true cliché, two unlikely roommates may find their future maid of honor or fraternity brother in a person at the opposite end of the Myers-Brigg spectrum.

Two sophomores, Hector Hernandez and Evelyn Ramirez, for example, never thought they would be roommates, but at the whim of the housing lottery, were thrown together in a Marcy double to complete a lottery group.

Because of Brown’s unique policy that allows gender-neutral housing, Hernandez and Ramirez were allowed to live in what some would think of as a tricky situation if they weren’t dating the person, or even knew them well beforehand. But for these two, the housing lottery scramble proved to be one of the best things about sophomore year.

“It wasn’t awkward at all,” Hernandez said. “I didn’t think of her as a girl. People would ask me all the time if it was weird, but I never saw it like that. She was a friend and we would tell each other things.”

Ramirez ended up transferring at the end of the semester, due to the homesickness that had plagued her since freshman year. But she was reluctant to leave her roommate, with whom she had created an unbreakable bond.

“I miss her,” Hernandez said. “She was kind of like my mentor. She would give me advice on girls. We would tease each other that we were like an old married couple, since we would always make sure we remembered our keys and I.D. We have these little moments that we won’t forget ever happened. And we don’t regret it.”

So sometimes, along with blind dates and Vegas weddings, computer-selected roommates can work out for the best. But, for every harmonious pair there is also a freshman starting second semester packing up the belongings he had so painstakingly unpacked just months before, moving out of his room into a more comfortable living situation with a different roommate.  If ResLife is relaxed enough to allow a swapping scramble, why not save students the trouble of packing and allow them more discretion in choosing a roommate to begin with?  If it’s all a crapshoot anyway, what harm could come out of a few more questions on that ResLife survey?