When Michelle James (COL ’09) chose her roommate the summer before her freshman year, she had no idea that her choice would frequently wake her up at 3 a.m. After pairing up with a roommate through the Campus Housing Roommate Matching System, better known as CHARMS, she planned on having regular sleep schedule – going to bed around midnight and waking up around 9 a.m. – and her new roommate was on board. But after arriving on campus, James and her roommate discovered that their lifestyles were more different than they imagined they would be. “My roommate was pre-med and she took bio and chem so she ended up staying up until 3 a.m. doing work and would accidentally wake me up,” James said. “But then because of her workload she wouldn’t go out as much and I would end up waking her up when I got home.” Unexpected lifestyle changes during the transition to college can create tension between roommates who expected to match up perfectly, students say. Kim Haines (COL ’09), James’ current roommate, says that the biggest failure of CHARMS has been ignoring the adjustments that students may make when they transition to college. What preferences students choose to list on CHARMS “may be what you are actually like at home, but when you get here, everything is different,” Haines said. “It’s not intentional, but it definitely happens.” Georgia Papatheodorou (COL ’10) feels that through CHARMS, incoming freshmen end up talking more about their personalities than their living habits. “I feel like we learned more about their interests and what they’re like as a person,” Papatheodorou said. “There’s no way to actually get to know what someone’s like until you meet them.” CHARMS was first implemented in the summer of 2004, when the Class of 2008 selected their freshman year roommates. Karen Frank, vice president of facilities and student housing, said that the number of students using the system has increased each year. Frank said that 34 percent of the sophomore class lives with roommates from freshman year. Jeff Trepper (MSB ’09), one of those who decided to continue living with his freshman year roommate, says that their success was due to their accuracy of their profiles. “If the person says everything truthfully then it can be very effective,” he said. The CHARMS questionnaire asks students about issues ranging from sleep and study habits to music preferences to cleanliness. Whether the broad questions are specific enough to help, or if they still leave room for the extremes, is a point of dispute among students. “I thought it was good because it nailed down the kind of people that are like you,” Kevin Benz (COL ’09) said. Benz said that despite choosing not to stay with his roommate from last year, he was not disappointed with CHARMS. “We got along fine, and he was a really good roommate, and we’re still friends,” he said. Mallory Warner (MSB ’09), however, said that CHARMS does not sufficiently stress many important factors when choosing a roommate. “I think times to wake up are a lot more important than they can make it out to be,” she said. Warner, who still lives with her roommate from last year, said that she “wholeheartedly” recommends CHARMS to incoming students. Students who chose to take themselves out of the CHARMS program are placed randomly with a student who answered the questions similarly. Molly Garratt (COL ’09) has many friends who chose to opt out of CHARMS, and she thinks that it worked out well for them. “Their roommate situations worked a lot better when they didn’t use CHARMS because I guess they didn’t have as much pressure to make it work,” she said. Charlotte Lowrey (COL ’09) removed herself from CHARMS and was placed with a roommate randomly. It worked out, and she decided to room with the same person again this year. “From my experience, CHARMS has just about the same success rate as people who didn’t use CHARMS,” she said. “There were basically as many people that loved their CHARMS roommate as those who hated their CHARMS roommate.”