First-Year Housing: Swipe Right for Roommates!

Kashmala Khan ’29

Contributing Writer

This year, Trinity decided to toss out the rulebook, spice things up and let us first-years pick our own housing and roommates through eRezLife. There was no usual “fill out a questionnaire and pray that Housing doesn’t stick you with a weirdo.” No “trust the process.” No Sorting Hat. Just us, a laggy website and the crumbling pressure of making one of the most important decisions of our teenage lives: who do I want to share four walls, a mini fridge and my mental breakdowns with?

Step one: the profiles. In an attempt to find someone to live with, we had to market ourselves like contestants on a strange dating show where no one knows each other. “Hi! I like quiet nights in, I clean sometimes, please choose me, I swear I’m normal.” Then came the tedious waiting. You are sitting there refreshing the page pondering: has anyone…liked me back? Am I about to get ghosted and end up roommate-less? It was like Tinder but scarier—with a lot of desperate DMs about sleep schedules and hopes that our hobbies match.

Then came the roommate search. The dating app references cannot end because it truly felt like speed dating without the free food. You are scrolling through profiles at 1 a.m. (sometimes alongside other roommates you found…oops), reading lines like, “I like music,” which, okay…but are we talking headphones or full-on DJ set in the middle of the night? Then you are DM’ing strangers with the weirdest small talk of your life: “Hey, do you believe in hygiene?” “What’s your stance on low lighting rooms?” Every roommate request felt almost like a proposal, and the second you clicked “confirm roommate,” you felt the need for a lawyer to be present.

But none of this compared to the real Hunger Games: housing selection. That was when the panic hit. You are sitting there refreshing Erez, praying to every god or heavenly body in existence that your time slot is early enough to snatch a quad. The second the portal opened it was like watching Ticketmaster crash on a Taylor Swift drop: quads were vanishing in real time, people were calling each other faster than stockbrokers on the floor of Wall Street. “What’s left? Did all of the Jackson quads disappear already? BUT IT’S ONLY BEEN AN HOUR?!” Witnessing your dream dorm go poof before your eyes had me ready to throw my laptop and howl at the window. Never mind the dreaded reality that when all the quads were gone, you’d have to split into two doubles.

Here is the thing, though: as traumatic as it was, eRezLife saved us from the classic first-year nightmare. Imagine waking up on day one to discover you’ve been paired with the Febreze enthusiast who believes spraying the room is equal to doing laundry, the deodorant-is-a-scam roommate or the eternal FaceTimer who conducts nightly calls at stadium volume.

At least this year most of us knew what we were walking into. We had the chance to have conversations, exchange memes and negotiate who was bringing the Brita. We chose our chaos. Yes, eRezLife gave me anxiety, a screen-time spike and possible permanent portal-induced trauma. But, honestly? I’ll take that over rolling-the-dice-with-mystery housing any day. Because now I have roommates (shoutout to my lovely quad) that I actually picked, who understand my chai addiction and haven’t (yet) revealed a secret taxidermy collection. Win.