Five young women are randomly assigned to the same floor in a residence hall. On paper they don’t look as if they have much in common: a working-class African-American, an affluent white girl, a first-generation college student, a Jew, a full-blooded Roman Catholic Croatian. Sounds like a bad bar joke. Last weekend I (the working-class African-American girl) got together with the other four women, almost 35 years since our freshman year in the residence hall.
Back in those days, before Facebook, e-mail and cell phones, there was really no easy way to contact your roommates before meeting them. The downside of this, of course, is that it was tough to figure out who might be bringing what. The upside (which I did not realize at the time) was that I could not form a preconceived notion of what my roommate might be like by looking at her picture, nor could she form the same of me.
Would my roommate (she ended up being the affluent white girl) have wanted to live with me if she knew I was African-American? If my Catholic hallmate had known her roommate was Jewish, would she have requested a room change before she got to campus?
When we moved into the residence halls, we all experienced the typical first-year jitters and awkwardness of five diverse strangers trying to get to know one another. Sure, my hair was different; one of my roommates did not celebrate Christmas; another roommate’s family lived in a house larger than any I had ever seen; and another struggled to pay the huge tuition bills while working full time to put herself through school.
Despite these differences in our backgrounds and physical appearances, we learned much about each other during our freshman year – particularly once we discovered we all enjoy the gift of gab and love football!
In various combinations, we continued to live with and by one another throughout college and into our twenties. And even after I transferred to another university, we remained close.
Over the last 35 years we have celebrated weddings and the birth of children and mourned the loss of parents and siblings. Even though I have no children, all of my friends have college-age kids, and since I work on a college campus, they all ask me for advice – hence, the inspiration for this column.
As we begin the new semester at SMU, those of you who are first-year students have the wonderful opportunity to have an experience similar to mine. I worry that because you can scope out your prospective roommates and hallmates beforehand, you will form judgments about them before you truly get to know them – particularly if one of them looks different, has a funny-sounding name or lives in “that” part of town.
So my piece of advice for those of you beginning your first year at SMU (and those of you who are returning): As our Mustang Corral speaker Bertice Berry says, “Take off your filter.”
If you do, who knows whom you might meet?
Dr. Lori White is SMU’s Vice President for student affairs. She can be reached for comment at
