Roommates and Best Practices
Having a roommate(s) can play a big part in your college life and beyond. Roommates often become life-long friends. With the right roommate, you can create a supportive and fun living environment that will enhance your academic journey.
Finding a Roommate
Whether you prefer a familiar roommate or someone with shared interests, the next step is getting to know each other.
Before agreeing to become roommates, schedule a meaningful conversation and assess if their preferences and lifestyle match yours.
- Discuss lifestyles, study habits, hobbies, daily routines, sleep schedules, and cleanliness practices
- Imagine living together in the space provided.
- Trust your instincts: sometimes, you’ll sense a connection.
Next, discuss and set clear boundaries, preferences and expectations to help create a positive living experience. Examples include the following:
- Share responsibilities. How will you divide chores, such as cleaning, cooking, or taking out the trash?
- Guest and privacy. Discuss preferences for having visitors and respecting each other's personal space.
- Shared cost. Clarify contributions to shared costs such as cleaning supplies.
- Conflict resolution. Talk about how you will address disagreements to maintain a healthy relationship. See entry below.
Undergraduate Halls
- Housing Registration's Roommate Questionnaire
- The first step to finding a roommate is to complete the roommate questionnaire as part of housing registration (via OSU Housing Portal) and to make it searchable by other residents. The questionnaire is a quick overview of you—your study habits, sleep schedule, cleanliness preferences and so forth.
- Be sure to provide a thoughtful description of yourself in the space provided.
- You can customize your search to find others who share the traits you are most interested in.
- If you can't find your roommate to-be in the OSU Housing Portal
- If you know that your roommate has completed their registration, and you can't find
their profile, you should double-check the following:
- Be sure your genders are the same on the personal profile section.
- Toggle on the "to be searchable" option on roommate questionnaire tab.
- If you know that your roommate has completed their registration, and you can't find
their profile, you should double-check the following:
- Room Transfers
- Residents might need to relocate during the academic year for various reasons.
- To understand the specific dates and policies regarding room changes or transfers, visit Request to Change/Transfer Room.
Conflict Resolution
-
Roommate Agreements
- In fostering a healthy roommate relationship, effective and open communication is vital. To aid this, Housing and Residential Life provides a roommate agreement program for residents.
- These agreements empower roommates to establish boundaries, preferences, and expectations upfront. Facilitated by a community mentor or apartment assistants these formal documents can be viewed and adjusted by all parties as necessary.