Not gonna lie this is a tricky thing. Mostly because many of you who are applying for this program have never really had to live on your own. If you have lived in an apartment with roommates for school you definitely have a leg up. But if you are like me and spent 4 years in college living in dorms (not by choice my school made me), consider yourself completely disadvantaged. Yeah maybe you have had to choose one roommate before, but try choosing 5 or 7 others to live with! Now that's a tall order!
So how do you tackle this task?
Well first let me start off by saying that the program tries to give you a choice of how many roommates you have. You can have anywhere from 0-7 roommates. I say try because you can apply for a 3 bedroom apartment (6 total people in the house) but you end up with a 4 bedroom (8 people). But go ahead and plan for the max you want and just see what happens.
Each term someone makes a Facebook group where you can meet a bunch of other people who are aspiring and accepted DCPer's. When acceptances start rolling out people will begin posting roommate surveys. It’s a quick and basic way to get to know people and start looking for people you might want to get to know more and then eventually room with. (Check this page every day or you might miss some really great people!)
The most important part when choosing roommates is to not be afraid to ask the hard questions. The roommate surveys are a great starting point but it should go a bit further then that. Especially if you are a person who is very particular about the way they like to live. If your segmental and very strong willed, my way is the highway type… A) room with the least amount of people possible or B) ask the tough uncomfortable questions.
I was so incredibly blessed to have ended up with 5 amazing roommates!!! Yes we had some issues but we worked them out. The biggest reoccurring issue we had and many of my other friends had with their roommates was cleaning. You will quickly learn that keeping the apartment clean, especially during room check weeks is a rough task. One of the things my roommates decided on when we met on FB was that we would have a chore rotation. Everyone was in charge of their own rooms and then as pairs we rotated between trash, dishes, countertops/stove.
That was literally the bulk of our issues cause again my roommates were freakin awesome! Here are some other issues I heard from my friends or read on the internet that you might want to think about and prep for.
- Having boys over after curfew
- Excessive late night Partying
- Inviting tons of people over without alerting all the roommates
- Failing housing inspections because one pair doesn’t clean their room.
- Roommate having loud relations with someone many nights in a row
- No one taking the trash out
- Leaving dirty dishes on the table
- One roommate always locking themselves out late at night
- Clothes left all around the room like blocking your path places
- Roommates that dont want to hang out with you ever
- Alcohol in a wellness (underage) apartment
You know, some things are just not worth fighting over. If you can go into it with that in mind, it just makes living with others a more present experience.
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