Looking for a Roommate? Complete a Personality Assessment
Everyone has different types of lifestyles and although you may be able to accept differences with friends and acquaintances, you need to be much more stringent when choosing roommates if you want a pleasant off campus living experience. Of course, compatibility with your new roommates is crucial to your overall happiness and productivity. You can make educated decisions during the roommate selection process that will help to ensure good roommate matching.
Preliminary questions to ask yourself and your potential roommates
When trying to decide if you have the right fit with potential roommates, it’s very important that you are honest about lifestyle preferences. Ask yourself and potential roommates a few simple roommate matching questions:
- Do you want a quiet atmosphere at home or are you very social and looking for someone to party with?
- Do you mind if your roommate’s significant other spends several nights sleeping at your place?
- Are you looking for a constant companion or do you prefer more privacy?
- Are you a heavy drinker, social drinker or not much of a drinker?
The answers to these preliminary questions will help you to narrow your search for a suitable roommate. Sometimes you can find student housing options that offer a roommate matching service to assist in matching similar personality and lifestyle habits. It can be tempting to select a gender-based roommate on the basis of how friendly they are. However, first impressions can be misleading. You have to really dig deeper to determine if a potential is a good fit in terms of financial commitments and lifestyle preferences.
Once you’ve got the preliminary questions out of the way, it is time to really look behind the curtain to figure out if this is really the right roommate for you.
Deeper questions to ask to ensure a good fit with potential roommates
Once you’ve narrowed your search and found suitable candidates you believe you can trust and tolerate, you need to go beyond the personality profile, and meet with the candidates face to face to ask them additional roommate matching questions:
- Do they smoke or drink?
- Do they like a really clean living space? Do they like to clean?
- Are they organized or disorganized?
- Do they enjoy talking or do they prefer to be quiet all the time?
- Do they talk about feelings or keep to themselves?
- What kind of music do they enjoy listening to?
- How much TV do they watch? What kind of shows do they watch?
- Do they prefer to watch TV alone?
- Are they fans of a sport team? Do they plan to have game night parties? Are you each a fan of opposing teams?
- Do they like to share personal items or do they prefer to keep their belongings separate?
- Do they have allergies, such as dust or pet allergies that affect their physical and mental health?
In order to ensure your ultimate safety and a peaceful living environment, you can do some additional investigation by requesting references from former roommates. Also, you can search the internet for the candidate’s name and e-mail address. This can present a red flag for dangerous, unpleasant or concerning activities. Becoming a friend with them on social media will also allow you a deeper glimpse into who they really are so connect with them on Twitter, Myspace, Instagram and Facebook.
Finding and living successfully with roommates may require some compromise
Despite a thorough roommate matching and screening process, it’s not a perfect world. Even people who are what seems to be perfect roommate matches will not agree on everything. So, the key to living successfully with your roommates is communication and compromise.