Anonymous wrote:They get over it. It's also weird that they consider themselves "besties" already.

That's just how kids talk, mommies!

Anonymous wrote:This happened to my daughter a few years ago. Yes, it stung for a while but she moved on. One nice touch is that the girl who got off the wait list sent my daughter all the college merchandise she had bought for the school my daughter was going to. Tshirts, sweatshirts, mugs, etc. It helped soften the blow.

That is very sweet!

OP, I think your daughter needs to tell her by phone or FaceTime, or even in person if they've been hanging out.

This is too important for a text. Just out of curiosity, did the roommate know your daughter was on a waitlist? If so, she won't be shocked. She'll be a little rattled, though.

Anonymous wrote:This happened to my daughter a few years ago. Yes, it stung for a while but she moved on. One nice touch is that the girl who got off the wait list sent my daughter all the college merchandise she had bought for the school my daughter was going to. Tshirts, sweatshirts, mugs, etc. It helped soften the blow.

That was so kind!

This happened to my daughter a few years ago. Yes, it stung for a while but she moved on. One nice touch is that the girl who got off the wait list sent my daughter all the college merchandise she had bought for the school my daughter was going to. Tshirts, sweatshirts, mugs, etc. It helped soften the blow.

Random selection is the way to go. (Although my kid found their roommate on Instagram and first year was fine). Less expectation. Not a good idea for roommates to be besties or have too much in common. Better if they have different majors and different interests so they can naturally give one another space.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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?

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 room 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.

Anonymous wrote: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.

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?

Anonymous wrote: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.

That’s still an option but is sooooo poorly communicated that my DD had zero idea this was even a thing before she put herself through the forced awkwardness of navigating the Instagram madness. It was truly painful yet had a (hopefully) positive outcome.
Definitely would have preferred a model where they just assign you based on a rooommate habits survey because the way they do it now makes it feel like almost no one waits to have the school match them. At least for the girls.
And that may not even be accurate but it is so underpublicized that this is even an option so the girls end up panic-scrambling to find someone.

Anonymous wrote:Yesterday got off waitlist for Northwestern. DS figuring it out with roommate.

Congratulations! Very happy for you. What was the school they were planning to attend?