The Student's Role

The Students’ Role

Communication is key in order to have a successful relationship with your roommate. During the first week of school at the first hall meeting, you and your roommate will receive a roommate contract to complete. This contract asks questions about living styles and allows you and your roommate to set rules in place about visitors, sleeping and study habits, cleanliness, noise control, and much more. It is important that you and your roommate take this contract seriously and that each of you are open and honest about your preferences and opinions. Roommates need to talk about issues on a regular basis.

Many times, roommates will need to meet with each other throughout the year as issues come up. Having regular conversations are important to establishing a successful living situation. When an issue arises with your roommate, you should follow these steps:

1. Your first step should be to discuss the issue with your roommate. Sometimes an action that might annoy or aggravate one roommate is something that the other roommate didn’t realize they were even doing. You may also want to refer back to your roommate contract during these types of discussions.

2. Give your roommate time to make changes. Most students have been living in their own room and/or house for 18 years. This means that roommates are going to have different expectations. When you mix your different expectations with different personalities, you need to be patient with each other and look for compromises.

3. If you and your roommate have tried to work through your issues and you all still can’t resolve them, you need to contact your RA so a mediation with your RA can be set up.

Here is a guide that roommates can use to faciliate their discussion.

Fair Fight Guidelines for Students:

• Remain Calm
• Set the ground rules first
• Talk with them not at them
• Focus on the issues and avoid revisiting past problems
• Deal with only one issue at a time
• No “hitting below the belt”
• Use “I statements” rather than accusations
• Don’t exaggerate or embellish a situation
• Take responsibility for own actions/don’t make excuses
• Do not make threats at any point
• If conversation is going in circles or one party is too upset to be fair, take a break

RAs Role
Parent's Role