Living with a Roommate You Don’t Get Along With

Senior year of high school, I attended the SWE Stayover, frantically trying to make a difficult choice between Penn State and Virginia Tech.  That decision didn’t come until much later, but at the SWE Stayover I did meet a girl who I instantly clicked with. We had so much in common and thought we would get along great.  We decided that if I came to Penn State that we would be roommates.  In the end, I picked Penn State (a decision I have never regretted) and we ended up being roommates. We tweeted and texted each other all summer, and even helped each other out with our problems at the beginning of the year.  Everything was going fantastic. In late October, she snapped. I’m not blaming it all on her because I don’t react very well to be screamed at. In the end we did end up yelling at each other very loudly around 2 am one night, over spilled water on her desk.  Needless to say, I didn’t sleep in my own dorm that night.  The entire first semester I would avoid her like the plague.  When we were both in the same room, we wouldn’t talk. It would be dead silence for as long as we were both together, which could be hours, only talking when it was absolutely necessary.  During that time, her annoying habits just seemed to annoy me even more. She skyped her friends from home for around 8 hours a day.  Literally 8 hours a day straight. She wouldn’t go to class, she would skype doing homework, and sometimes she wouldn’t put headphones in. During this time I would usually just do my homework in the library or hang out with my friends or at my boyfriend’s dorm. Whenever I would come home though, she would always be skyping. All the little things that she did like that started to get under my skin. I thought about switching my room for the second semester, but it was MY idea to live in west, not hers. SHE should have to move, not me! I missed the room transfer deadline, and hoped that the coming semester would be better than the one I was currently enduring. And you know what? It did get better, slowly but surely. I always had class in the mornings and she had class in the afternoons, but even so, we just started to get over our fight, no matter how long it took.  We realized it was stupid and it the past, and that we were mature adults.  After Christmas break, we were completely fine. We weren’t friends at all, but we were roommates. We had a silent, mutual agreement about how things worked in our dorm, and we never fought again.  Needless to say, we are not rooming together next year.  I’m just glad we worked everything out before it got even worse. What could I have done to make the situation better? I think I could’ve realized that it was a fight over some spilled water. It was late and we weren’t in the best mind set. I think I should’ve gotten over it sooner, so we could’ve been civilized roommates instead of hating each other for an entire semester.

Katie Farnum is a sophomore in Mechanical Engineering and a Rover for WEPO'13.  To read more about Katie visit her WEPO Profile: http://raindancer45.wix.com/ladyengineers#!katie-farnum/c20xo