This year’s incoming first-year students had the opportunity to do what no other class at Georgetown has done before: use the Internet to chat with each other, and invite various people who they’ve met online to be their roommate.
After years of development and testing, the Office of Housing put into operation a new system called the Campus Housing Roommate atching System (CHARMS).
The new system gave members of the Class of 2008 the option of selecting their own roommate. Its development was the result of staff and student input suggesting that students have the option to select their own roommates in order to make for a more enjoyable first year at Georgetown .
“We hope that people will feel more like they need to see the relationship through,” John Glassman, housing assignment specialist, said. “We hope they’ll work out roommate conflicts and won’t feel like they got thrown together and that it isn’t up to them to make the roommate pairing work.”
Students were given the option of either participating in CHARMS or filling out the Living Preference Questionnaire, which was previously the main indicator of roommate matching for students at Georgetown . Close to half of incoming freshmen used CHARMS, which was a program designed and built in-house at Georgetown.
CHARMS was designed to be more detailed than the Living Preference Questionnaire, as it ran in stages throughout the period of the summer. Students had until June 22 to record their living preferences by ranking the importance of living preferences such as sharing, extracurricular activities, room temperature, study environment, TV, sleeping, music and eating, among other categories.
Once students recorded their living preferences, they had from June 23 to July 14 to search for roommates with close matches and exchange messages with each other anonymously and securely through a specially-designed message room.
Finally, once a student found another with whom they thought they were compatible, they had the option of inviting that student to be their roommate through their Georgetown e-mail account.
“If you found someone you wanted to room with, you could send an invitation to room and then that person would either respond back or leave it,” Rebecca West ( COL ’08) said.
Students were not required to participate in CHARMS, and those who chose not to were paired by the Housing Office based on Living Preference Questionnaire responses.
Many first-year students said they were very satisfied with the ease of the matching system and believe that the selections will have rewarding results. “I think it was a great idea and was very well run,” West said.
Georgetown is not the only university to implement a roommate selection system. Other institutions such as Emory University have established similar systems to make for a more enjoyable first year.
Using a system called Webroomz, students at Emory can log on and choose a roommate after being asked a variety of questions. Students are given a list of their top 20 matches, based on the percentage of questions that were answered the same way.
“I found the system to be incredibly beneficial for me,” Sarah Schietroma, a sophomore at Emory, said. “My roommate and I had over 80 percent of the same answers to the questions we were asked. In fact, everyone on my freshman hall got along with their roommate except for one room, and a lot of people have kept the same roommate for sophomore year.”
