LIVING IN SYNC Episode 1: living with a roomate, crazy roomates, Finding roomates

In this episode, we dive into all things room­mates! From fun­ny sto­ries to tips on build­ing strong, pos­i­tive rela­tion­ships with your room­mates, we cov­er it all. Whether you’ve had the per­fect room­mate or a chal­leng­ing one, this episode will give you insights, laughs, and prac­ti­cal advice on how to live in har­mo­ny. Tune in, and let us know your cra­zi­est room­mate expe­ri­ences in the comments!

We hope you enjoy and stay tuned for more episodes!

https://on.soundcloud.com/3WReHkQkBb2vbfKj8

Tran­scrip­tion:

I’m an exchange stu­dent for the first time in this semes­ter and I’m shar­ing a dou­ble room in East Cam­pus with an Amer­i­can room­mate. How­ev­er, the room­mate hung up the phone too loud­ly in the room. I asked her if she could hang up the phone in the lounge. How­ev­er, she said it was a chal­lenge. So, we decid­ed to hang up the phone in the room until nine o’clock.

Also, bring­ing a friend to sleep in the dorm is a penal­ty in a exchange. In my coun­try, but it is com­mon here. And I was stressed out because she enjoys it. Final­ly, we have estab­lished rules now. But in this process, we talked about these issues with our RA. But I got into trou­ble with set­ting the num­ber of days I could bring my friends and sleep over.

I orig­i­nal­ly did­n’t like bring­ing the friends over for a day and putting them in the dorm. But I gave way and set three, but my room­mate insist­ed. Did on num­ber five, and when I said no, our A said num­ber four. So I said, okay, but my room­mate laughed at me there in that moment, I was annoyed and tears birthed.

In the end, it end­ed well by agree­ing with each oth­er, but it was an expe­ri­ence that cul­mi­nat­ed in the sad­ness and dif­fi­cul­ty of liv­ing far away.

Wow. So what is up you guys, and wel­come to Liv­ing in Sync. Our names are Eri­ca, Desiree. And we’re, we also have our friend Jovi who’s going to be join­ing and chim­ing in a lit­tle bit.

Um, so as you heard already in this episode, we’re going to be talk­ing about room­mate issues, find­ing a good room­mate, and restor­ing a bro­ken room­mate rela­tion­ship. So Aion, just to be, just to kind of clar­i­fy. So you want­ed to bring your friend over for,

Oh, no, she want to bring her friend over

for five days.

Yeah, that’s a lot of days Mm hmm, and you want­ed to you told her to do it for three days and then you know You the RA kind of helped you guys set­tle it for four days. Mm hmm. Okay, cool So now we’re gonna have our friend Jovi chime in with some expert infor­ma­tion in fact, and then we can go from there

Hi, my name is Jovi Jovanovic.

I’m a senior here at UConn and I’ve lived on cam­pus all four years. I’ve had a total of four dif­fer­ent room­mates, so I know first­hand how dif­fi­cult it can be to jug­gle those kinds of rela­tion­ships. Room­mate rela­tion­ships are so impor­tant because you not only spend so much time with the per­son, But you also have to share your per­son­al space.

That was some­thing that def­i­nite­ly took get­ting used to for me. A study done at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty found that 5. 6 per­cent of under­grad­u­ates report­ed hav­ing room­mate dif­fi­cul­ties and that those con­flicts and dif­fi­cul­ties hin­dered their aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance. In a study of 416 stu­dents, liv­ing in res­i­dent halls they found that con­flict with one’s room­mate was a sig­nif­i­cant pre­dic­tor of over­all stress levels.

I know per­son­al­ly when I’m hav­ing room­mate issues it def­i­nite­ly takes a toll on my study­ing habits and my over­all mood and anx­i­ety. 41 per­cent of Amer­i­cans aged 18 to 24 are cur­rent­ly enrolled in under­grad­u­ate pro­grams across the coun­try. Of the ones liv­ing on cam­pus 50. 1 per­cent of women and and 44.

1 per­cent of men report­ed hav­ing fre­quent and occa­sion­al con­flict with the woman. their room­mates or house­mates. Draw­ing bound­aries and find­ing the words to dis­cuss your con­flicts with room­mates can be dif­fi­cult and can def­i­nite­ly take get­ting used to if you’ve nev­er lived with peo­ple out­side of your fam­i­ly before.

Anoth­er study found in the Jour­nal of Sci­ence of the Total Envi­ron­ment from the Feb­ru­ary 2020 vol­ume found that 68. 49 per­cent of stu­dents expe­ri­ence sleep depri­va­tion. And their total deep or REM sleep time decreas­es. Indoor noise is the most influ­en­tial fac­tor affect­ing sleep among col­lege students.

This indoor noise can be a room­mate stay­ing up late to do home­work, a room­mate talk­ing on the phone, watch­ing TV while you’re try­ing to sleep, even just wak­ing up ear­li­er than you and cook­ing break­fast. All of these things can affect your sleep, which in the end affects your study­ing habits, your mood.

For fresh­men, since a bunch of us are most­ly Almost done with our col­lege expe­ri­ences. I’m a senior right now. Eri­ka, you’re a senior as well. I’m a junior. You’re almost there, Ahy­oung. So we’ll start off with, what is some, what is some­thing you want your fresh­man self to know as some­body com­ing into UConn and liv­ing on campus?

I think they should have known that we can write down the Husky Agree­ment on the term. It makes to, you know, com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er with Rumi, um, and make some rules. Yeah.

Um, so my expe­ri­ence is a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent because I went to uni­ver­si­ty my fresh­man and sopho­more year at a dif­fer­ent uni­ver­si­ty, and I always had a sin­gle but we def­i­nite­ly still have to share like a kitchen and a bath­room and stuff.

Um, and so I think just going off of just shar­ing any space in gen­er­al, def­i­nite­ly open com­mu­ni­ca­tion. How­ev­er, when I moved to when I trans­ferred to UConn actu­al­ly, um, I did have a room­mate liv­ing in an off cam­pus apart­ment, and she’s actu­al­ly a, she was a lot old­er than I am, so I assumed that our room­mate part­ner­ship would be a lit­tle bit eas­i­er because of the age dif­fer­ence, because she was in her upper 20s, like she’s a, like past her PhD, and I’m still like, I was a junior at the time, so I’m think­ing, okay, it’s gonna be real­ly easy to work with her, but it was­n’t as easy as I thought, and so I.

I wish we actu­al­ly sat down and like talked about like room­mate agree­ments and stuff Um, because we end­ed up hav­ing issues down the line um, and so i’d say like no mat­ter what, you know, year you are def­i­nite­ly like You know when you first come togeth­er with your room­mate hav­ing like a good con­ver­sa­tion and hav­ing like a group, a room­mate agree­ment about some­thing and you know, just clar­i­fy­ing something.

And so I took that expe­ri­ence when I moved to my cur­rent off cam­pus hous­ing for my final year. Um, I was the one that took the ini­tia­tive and wrote a whole agree­ment. Like I wrote a whole con­tract for all my two room­mates. We sat down, we talked about it. We actu­al­ly have a room­mate. meet­ing tonight because there are already some things I’m notic­ing in the house and I’m like rather than because some­thing I used to do is I’d keep it to myself and it would kind of like bub­ble up inside of me like when I kind of noticed ten­den­cies about the room­mate that I did­n’t like rather than just like You know, just let­ting them know and being honest.

I kind of kept it to myself and kind of brushed it off, but then even­tu­al­ly became real­ly annoy­ing to the point where like now they’re very present. It’s like, you’re just an annoy­ing per­son, which obvi­ous­ly isn’t the case rather than if I had just told them like, Hey, maybe there’s some things that you’ve been doing, you know, that could, you know, have been a lit­tle bit annoy­ing to me or not right as a roommate.

So I think that, you know, one thing that I have been want­i­ng to imple­ment mov­ing for­ward, which is why we’re hav­ing our meet­ing tonight is just telling them like, Hav­ing every­one talk about how they feel so far because it’s been a month liv­ing in And togeth­er and just kind of like talk­ing about you know Their expe­ri­ences and what we want to do bet­ter mov­ing for­ward just so we don’t step on one anoth­er’s toes and stuff So yeah, def­i­nite­ly open com­mu­ni­ca­tion hav­ing a meet­ing hav­ing some form of agree­ment like Ion said and yeah over to you Desiree So I

guess the main thing that we kind of all agree on is that we need to set bound­aries way ahead of time before Any issues can come up for my fresh­man year I was lucky.

My room­mate was an angel. Her name was Eve­lyn. I still think about her to this day. Are you guys friends? Um, no, I don’t talk to her. No, but you know why I loved her? Cause she nev­er spoke to me. Oh, cool. Eve­lyn was an angel because we were like, two, I, Have you ever seen like, those fun­ny memes where Capy­bara is by a giant croc­o­dile, and the croc­o­dile’s not eat­ing it or anything?

That was me and her. We were two beings that exist­ed in the same space, and we just let each oth­er be. Because, well, when we first met up, I mean, this was fresh­man year, so, we did do the Husky Room­mate Agree­ment, and we’re both, uh, what I came off, what hit off first was that we’re both intro­verts. We did­n’t real­ly need to talk about stuff, cause we did­n’t have any issues.

And with the Husky Room­mate Agree­ment, there’s a sec­tion where it’s like, any spe­cif­ic rules you want to set down, it’s a, like, you write it out. And me and her look at each oth­er, and we’re sit­ting there for ten min­utes, I was like, oh, I got one. No drugs. And she was like, great, that’s great. It was the most basic one.

But we agreed on it. And for the rest of the semes­ter, we would hard­ly ever talk to each oth­er. She was also hard­ly ever there. But that’s what I liked about her. I still think about you today, Eve­lyn. You’re such a great room­mate. And yeah, it’s just like, it’s also about a thing about per­son­al­i­ties clash­ing a lot.

Because some­one could be a good friend, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly a good room­mate. I’ve learned this over the years. Um. Um. Because with my pre­vi I live off cam­pus now, I com­mute, but last year, junior year, I lived up in Gara­gus. Those Gara­gus suites. I’m not sure if you’ve seen them, but how the suites work at UConn is that there’s three peo­ple to a room, and there’s a shared bath­room, and then anoth­er room with know that.

So it’s six peo­ple. Six peo­ple is a lot. Espe­cial­ly if it’s women. Yeah. Women, you would think that they would be clean. They’re not all the time. Yeah, I agree. But any­way, this suite, um, the main thing about it was that the bath­rooms, like I was say­ing, you have to have set bound­aries with bathrooms.

Espe­cial­ly if it’s shared amongst six women and half the time you’re only see­ing like two oth­ers, just your suite your room­mates. What oth­er parts about the Yukon dorm life exact­ly stood out to you or kind of makes you, not gri­mace, but kind of like Wish you knew more about before­hand. In

my opin­ion, I also agree with that com­mu­ni­ca­tion with me and my roommate.

Just sim­ple is the best because I think when I go my dorm, I just want to take a rest and just sleep. And also my room­mate is always just spend her time on her bed. So we just check our con­di­tion each oth­er and just, Hey, how are you? Yeah, I think it is just nor­mal. Talk about only the sim­ple thing every day.

Some­thing else about the UConn expe­ri­ence is that, from what I know, well, when I lived in Gara­gas, it was com­mu­nal, uh, co ed floors. So that I was liv­ing with women, of course, but then across the Roy in the hall­way would be men or some­thing. And I think a lot of the dorms, the dorms do this around here.

It’s, the main fresh­man ones are like north. North­west, pos­si­bly, uh, Tow­ers, and Hill­top, if you’re in the learn­ing com­mu­ni­ties. Fan­cy peo­ple. Um, but also you have to get used to the co ed floors, where it might be all women on one floor, but then up there it’s gonna be men and alter­nat­ing each time. So, the thing about that is, um, noise.

Noise, yeah, I agree. Like, it would­n’t always be the room­mate specif­i­cal­ly that would make noise. In my expe­ri­ence, it was always the peo­ple above me, and I was on the fourth floor. I don’t know how the heck. It was, I was on the top floor and some­how there was noise on my ceil­ing, so let that mys­tery be there.

But the thing about adjust­ing to UConn is that a lot of kids in their fresh­man year, this is their first time Like, away from home, espe­cial­ly liv­ing on their own. And they’re sur­round­ed by a bunch of oth­er sim­i­lar aged peo­ple. It gets very chaot­ic very quick­ly. And I think that some­thing that we imme­di­ate­ly learn when you start liv­ing on cam­pus is that not every­body’s home trained.

Yeah, that’s

so true. By home train­ing, I mean like they don’t clean up after them­selves prop­er­ly, which isn’t usu­al­ly a prob­lem, unless you’re liv­ing in an area that might have a kitchen, a bath­room, or if you’re shar­ing a space with some­body that does­n’t seem to be on the same wave­length as you. I

agree, yeah.

I think col­lege made me real­ize how dif­fer­ent our lives are. For

exam­ple, I just live in my Kore­an dorm, but this is my first dorm life in the U. S., So, um, in com­par­i­son to dif­fer­ent cities, like, I guess, in Korea, we just respect our spaces more, and we just talk on the phone or just. I think we just keep our, keep, keep it down in the dorm because we don’t want to make a loud noise in our room, but in U.

S. just peo­ple do their own thing, you know, like if I’m study­ing, my room­mate just keep talk­ing on the phone. In my case, if I’m study­ing, my room­mate just keep talk­ing on the phone and she does­n’t care about why, what I’m doing. So, it is kind of dif­fer­ent cul­ture and. Dif­fer­ent, you know per­son­al­i­ties. Yeah.

Are you a part of any of like the cul­tur­al clubs on cam­pus when like talk­ing with oth­er? For­eign exchange stu­dents where they’re also sur­prised at how Amer­i­can, specif­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can col­lege cul­ture is.

Yeah, many exchange stu­dents also have some dif­fi­cul­ties with their room­mates, like the room­mate just naked in the room or just, yeah.

Put lotion, like that, and also my friend said that her room­mates bring her boyfriend in the dorm and they fucked up in the room, even if she’s in the bed. Yeah, so I was so sur­prised of that, like, in Korea, that is real­ly, real­ly bad thing, and if that hap­pen, if that thing hap­pen, that per­son have to go out of the college.

So I just shocked.

So mov­ing on, we’re going to go on to some stud­ies that have hap­pened. Thank you Nation­al Library of Med­i­cine. This study, col­lege room­mates have a mod­est but sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on each oth­er’s polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. From Logan Strother, Spencer Pis­ton, Ezra Gold­en­stein, Gol­ber­stein, Sarah Golest, and Daniel Eisenberg.

So pret­ty much, from what I under­stand through the abstract, is that they try to test whether or not the idea that col­lege makes you more lib­er­al was actu­al­ly true. Because that’s kind of a com­mon thing, I’m not sure about in all col­leges. But in Amer­i­can col­leges, there def­i­nite­ly is like that polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy ingrained in col­lege life.

Where we’ve seen stu­dent protests all the time. We’ve seen it for like Viet­nam. Right now we’re see­ing it for Pales­tine and Israel. Um, so they kind of looked at this. I think this was back in 2020, so it was­n’t even with Pales­tine and Israel yet. And what they found was that while we did find lit­tle evi­dence that col­lege stu­dents as a whole become more lib­er­al over time, we do find strong evi­dence of peer effects in which stu­dents polit­i­cal views become more in line with the views of their room­mates over time.

And this effect is strongest for con­ser­v­a­tive stu­dents. So, they argue that this is kind of an aspect of why maybe we have a high­er lev­el of polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion right now. But I want your thoughts on like, are you see­ing this kind of phe­nom­e­non hap­pen­ing too right now? It’s kind of a loaded question.

Sor­ry. It is.

Um, so first, where is this study from

again? Like the web­site itself is the Nation­al Cen­ter for Biotech­nol­o­gy Infor­ma­tion. But Daniel Eisen­berg, I believe his name pops up in anoth­er study, which is done at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan. From the New York Times back in 2010.

Okay, so your ques­tion is if we feel like, based on our expe­ri­ences, if being a col­lege stu­dent and liv­ing with room­mates makes you more liberal?

Lib­er­al or the oth­er way around, it seems, where it’s just not nec­es­sar­i­ly col­lege itself that makes you more polar­ized, but it’s the peo­ple you sur­round your­self with, which I can understand.

Yeah, I think I think it depends on the expe­ri­ence. Because for some­one can say, yeah, I absolute­ly think col­lege made me more lib­er­al, liv­ing with a room­mate made me more lib­er­al, because it allowed me to voice out my opin­ions and express things.

Maybe like, for exam­ple, if some­one from high school, you know, in high school they were pret­ty, like, timid and they did­n’t feel com­fort­able speak­ing in class and things like that. How­ev­er, they go to, they go to col­lege and they have to live with the room­mates and they have to, you know, talk to peo­ple, have group projects and all that.

all these dif­fer­ent things. So they have no choice but to voice out their opin­ions. They have no choice but to inter­act with peo­ple. They have no choice but to express them­selves. And so in that sense, they, I guess, gain a bit of like self, like free­dom in the inside where they feel like, okay, I feel lib­er­al because being in col­lege as a stu­dent, hav­ing room­mates has allowed me to do all these things that I was so scared to do, like in high school and stuff.

And so I guess in that case, like that per­son could say, yeah, col­lege has allowed me to be lib­er­al because it has allowed me to come out of my shell in many ways. Does that make sense?

For sure. I think the main thing is that your room­mate who is going to be spend­ing the most time with you in col­lege It’s def­i­nite­ly gonna have impact on you as a person.

Yeah, and

we

just hope for the best But I guess we can end off by talk­ing about tips to for find­ing a good room­mate or you know We kind of talked about advice. We focus a lot on com­mu­ni­ca­tion so we can talk on like Find­ing a good room­mate, or how to, like, find a good room­mate sit­u­a­tion, but also restor­ing a bro­ken rela­tion­ship, for exam­ple, if you guys had a fight before, and you’re just like, I don’t like this girl, but I still have to live with her for the next six months of my life, so how am I, can I restore, and at least, you don’t have to be friends, but at least try and be peace­ful in the room.

So there’s main­ly two types of room­mates that you start off with. One is one you find ahead of time. Hope­ful­ly it’s a friend from high school, maybe, or a friend that you’ve known. So that you’re more com­fort­able liv­ing with them. And then the oth­er option would be ran­doms. Which aren’t always bad at all.

Like, I love my ran­dom, I love you Eve­lyn. Um, but either way, I think for both of these sit­u­a­tions it applies where you need to set bound­aries way ahead of time. You need to make things clear, and you it does take time to under­stand how oth­er peo­ple are liv­ing to under­stand exact­ly what kind of per­son they are.

But, for sure, you need to com­mu­ni­cate clear­ly. On a fun­ny note, I was just look­ing at that arti­cle I men­tioned, and to get, like, par­tic­i­pants for the study, stu­dents were sent an intro­duc­to­ry let­ter with a 10 bill and a request to par­tic­i­pate. So they bribed them. That was just fun­ny to me.

All right, you guys, so that is the end of the episode.

Once again, you’re lis­ten­ing to Liv­ing in Sync. Once again, my name is Eri­ca. Desiree. Ahyeong .

And you also heard from our oth­er chat cast host Jovi. And we hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Let us know what some of your crazy room­mate sto­ries that you guys have expe­ri­enced, or you’ve heard from friends and loved ones.

And with­out fur­ther ado, we hope you guys enjoy this episode once again, and we’ll see you guys lat­er. Bye! Bye.

Links to Research:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7812804

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/education/25roomscience‑t.html