The last thing you expected to go wrong at college was your roommate situation.
His filth draws cockroaches, he urinates on the floor (right next to the toilet), throws his stinky clothes on your bed and sends a shock wave of a stench through the hall every time you open your dorm door.
Girls, your roommates are pesky in different, more spiteful ways. Maybe it was your roomie’s turn to clean, but she conveniently forgot, so you flunked your room check. She blares her stereo in the morning when you’re trying to sleep in, and she invites friends over to party when you’re trying to go to bed at night. She hits the snooze button a million times before getting out of bed, and you think you’ll scream if she leaves her alarm set on a Saturday one more time when she goes away for the weekend and you stay in the dorm.
Yes, these frightening roommate scenarios are all too common for poor, unsuspecting college students. Learning how to deal with these real-life nightmares can be even tougher than mastering your academic subjects! Keeping your cool with a pesky roommate is not impossible.
Here are a few tips that might just help your survive your roommate nightmare.
Be Big
You are the bigger person, so act like it! Don’t take your roommate’s flaws personally, he or she seriously just doesn’t know how to function in the real world.
If you learn to let the small stuff roll off of your back, you will spare yourself a lot of headaches. Sure, your roommate might be the world’s biggest slob, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary.
If you want to cry because you think it’s not fair that you have to do most of the cleaning for room checks, then you’re in for a rude awakening. Most of life is not fair.
Consider this good practice for life in the real world, you know, the life that comes after college.
Be Open
It sounds a bit hard to believe when you’re in the middle of a difficult situation, but your roommate is human, too. Maybe she really and truly has no clue how she has offended you.
Just be frank. Don’t be rude and aggressive, but be honest.
Open up the conversation by paying a complement to your roomie. Tell her something she does that you genuinely appreciate, and then ease into the negative stuff.
After discussing the negative, jump right back into something positive. Think of this as a good communication “sandwich.”
If you are willing to try it, you will be amazed at how well it really works. And whether or not you succeed in correcting your roommate’s bad habits, odds are you will find that person a bit easier to live with.
You might even learn to live with your roomie’s embarrassing tendencies.
Be Looking
If your roommate is one of those that does not fall under the category of a “normal” bad roommate, like if your roommate is manic depressive and attempts suicide every few days, then it might be time to start seriously looking for a new roommate.
You are probably getting tired of coming back to your dorm after a long day, only to find broken glass and miscellaneous pills strewn all over the room. Maybe if you were pursuing a degree in psychology, you could consider this good practice. But most people will want to get out of this type of situation as soon as possible.
Spend some time “secretly” interviewing friends to find out who would make a good roommate. In other words, try to find things out that would prove that your friends are either good or bad roommate material. Face it, if your roommate is as bad as the types already mentioned, things can only get better from here.
And once you find the perfect roommate for you, you’ll never know how you survived dorm life before!