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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have loved so much of the W&M onboarding process, but they've moved to a "idk find a roommate on Instagram?" model and it has added so much stress to my kid's summer. After years of me talking about how "personal" W&M is, this feels like a giant step backward, and I hope they go back to an "assigned roommates based on surveys" model for the future.[/quote]
Literally just got back from a W&M tour and they talked about how you could fill out a survey to match with a roommate if you didn’t want to do the social media thing or find a roommate some other way. I feel like maybe you/your kid got some bad information somewhere in the process?[/quote]
PP here. It’s not worth hashing out the whole process here, but there are four ways rooms get assigned at W&M. “Find a roommate on social media” is the one that both gets mentioned in info sessions first AND kicks in about as soon as people start announcing that they’re in to the school (which is outside the school’s control, but they definitely don’t help the situation, due to their mentioning it so prominently in info sessions). Second is a lifestyle survey that students can fill out, which then lets them see matches on a portal (“you match with this person 96%”) that they can then reach out to to self-select a roommate. That’s the next-most-emphasized approach. Third is that if they don’t have a roommate by the room selection time, they can pick the [i]room[/i] they want to be in (from whatever’s still available), and whoever picks the other bed in their room is their roommate. Fourth is the option you mentioned (and a post or two higher in the thread also mentioned), where the school uses those lifestyle surveys to match people up. But they bury the info about that option so far down in the info sessions, nobody knows about them (as the poster a few posts up mentions). I’m glad your tour  mentioned the survey, but I suspect that the vast majority of the people who know about the surveys believed they were just for the self-selecting portal (option two, above). I would imagine barely anyone knew about the “just sit back and let res life match you up” option.

The whole thing is just needlessly stressful, and, from what I gather, ineffective. As in the students who are paired up and assigned a roommate end up with higher satisfaction scores than students who match on social media.

We can move on from this tangent, though. Didn’t mean to take up so much space with it.[/quote]

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