Living with a roommate can be an adjustment for first-year Kansas University college students.

After years of having their own room at home, students might find it difficult to share a small living space with another person. Communication can be the key to making sure that any small problems between roommates don’t turn into major issues, according to Association of University Residence Halls president Aramis Watson.

“You have to sit down and talk about your habits, your likes and dislikes,” Watson said. “You’re living in a very new situation. Most people come from a background where they don’t have experience with living in a community-type setting like we have here and they really don’t have experiences sharing a room with someone.”

The university has rules and procedures to help make sure roommate conflicts are kept to a minimum.

“You can rely on some of the departmental guidelines, like the roommate contract and your residence assistant, too,” Watson said. “You can use the tools that are in place for people who are having issues with their roommate, and nine times out of 10 people don’t have issues with their roommate.”

The roommate contract is a document which allows roommates to determine the rules of the room at the beginning of the semester.

“It’s a tool to aid roommates, a very important tool,” said Diana Robertson, associate director of housing. “It’s things like, ‘If there’s food in the room, are we sharing this food? Is the room a study space or a hanging out space? How do we handle having guests in the room?”

Discussing problems

Robertson also thinks that communication and discussing potential problems before they happen is key to a happy roommate relationship.

“Don’t assume that they know what you’re thinking and feeling,” she said. “You have to communicate with your roommate about what your needs and feelings are. Part of it is having realistic expectations. You can’t expect your roommate to read your mind. Sometimes it works out that you’re good enough friends to where you’d think you could read your minds but you have to work to get to that relationship.”

Even with communication, not all roommate matchups work out. The first step for students who just can’t get along with their roommate is to talk to their residence assistant.

“Sometimes situations just can’t be resolved and people probably aren’t meant to live together,” Robertson said. “You tell your RA and they’ll see what they can do to help out and then they’ll notify their supervisor if they think a roommate switch needs to be facilitated.”

To make sure students try to get along with their new roommate, KU has a two-week moratorium on switches at the beginning of the year.

“We really do want people to try and work on things at first let them get to know their roommate and we’re still trying to get our records completely accurate about who has and hasn’t shown up,” Robertson said. “We want to be clear on where we can move people, if need be.”

‘Building floor communities’

Even is a student doesn’t mind living with another person, living in the same building with as many or more people than he or she went to high school with can be daunting. Robertson suggests getting involved with a smaller group on campus to alleviate that fear.

“We work real hard on building floor communities so that people feel like they’re part of something that’s not so huge,” Robertson said. “You can get involved on the floor level and you can feel like you’re part of a smaller community that’s more like what you came from.”

Watson recommends students decide just how large they want the university to seem to them and then make it that size through their actions.

“One thing that I’ve learned about KU,” she said, “is that you can make it as big of a university as you want to or as small of a university as you want to, and I think that really depends on the type of experience you’re looking to have.”

Robertson suggests that students look forward to meeting a new person and find out about the person and their life instead of dreading living with a stranger.

“Sometimes there’s the initial feeling that if somebody is different than you, in some way there’s a sense that it won’t work,” she said, “but what we find out is that once you take time to get to know each other you have more in common than differences and that those differences aren’t scary.

“Look at it as an exciting opportunity and get a chance to know someone whose background is different than yours. That’s part of the fun of college, and hopefully life.”