Think back to your first day at Stern, when you moved into Brookdale and met your roommates for the first time. While many of us recognize that roommates are important, I contend that none of us fully appreciate the power of roommates to transform our college experiences.
It is well known that the people we surround ourselves with can have immense impacts on us, but this influence is intensified during the first year of college when students are learning to transition from high school or seminary into the newfound independence, stresses, and responsibilities of college life. Allison Ryan, an associate professor of education psychology at the University of Illinois, emphasizes the significance of college freshmen’s roommates. She believes that because first year students are learning to “build their own identities [they are] especially impressionable to a roommate’s sway.” A plethora of research studies have discovered that freshman roommates exert influence upon a person’s weight, emotional disposition, study habits, academic achievement, and political attitudes.
A study of freshmen roommates was conducted at Marquette University. The study sought to determine how the weight of one roommate affects the weight of the other. The results revealed that students with heavier roommates gained less weight than students with thinner roommates. While the latter on average gained two and a half pounds during their freshmen year, students with heavier roommates only gained about a half a pound.
The researchers’ theoretical explanation for this phenomenon hinges on the fact that four-fifths of the heavier roommates were constantly dieting and exercising. The constant dieting and exercising created a weight conscious environment which subsequently led the study subjects to watch their weight. This discovery is especially crucial for female college students, as women between the ages of seventeen and nineteen are highly susceptible to developing eating disorders. Students who live in a strict weight conscious environment are particularly at risk.
Nicholas A Christakis, who co-authored “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks to Shape Our Lives,” observes that “each happy friend a person has increases that person’s probability of being happy by nine percent and each unhappy person decreases it by seven percent.” Clearly, emotions and moods are contagious. This was studied by Daniel Eisenberg, a professor at the University of Michigan. He surveyed 1,600 freshmen in both public and private universities. Interestingly, male students are more susceptible than females to the emotions of their roommates. Specifically with sadness, male students who have depressed roommates feel sadder themselves. However, Eisenberg noticed that this effect was more apparent when roommates kept their emotions bottled up.
The X-Box Effect was studied by Professor Todd Stinebrickner of the University of Western Ontario. He surveyed roommates at Berea College in Kentucky and found that students whose roommates brought video games to college actually studied a half hour less a day than students whose roommates did not bring video games. And as would be expected, non gamer roommates earned a 0.2 higher G.P.A score than gamer roommates.
Another interesting phenomenon that was studied was the effect that race of ones roommate had on the other. Academics at the Ohio State University noticed that black students who scored high SAT and ACT scores actually earned higher G.P.As if they roomed with a white roommate as opposed to a black roommate. The possible reason suggested for this trend is that having a white roommate, in a university in which the majority of students are white, helps ease the social and academic transition into college.
Studies at Ohio State and Indiana University Bloomington found that while biracial roommates were more likely to separate after their freshmen year, the effect of living with someone of a different race reduced prejudices. A study conducted with 1,000 freshmen showed that white students who roomed with black students agreed more strongly with diversity policies.
And thus it is evident, that one’s college roommates can greatly impact, not only one’s college experience, but also one’s later life as well.
The Science of Roommates
By ABIGAIL SULLIVAN MOORE