It’s the oldest cliché in the books: students go off to college and become best friends with their roommates. Unfortunately, for many students, the opposite happens.
SMU Live reporters spread out across campus to uncover the bad and the ugly stories of living with a stranger. Some roommates were messy, others were rude and a few were downright disgusting. Below is a collection of some of the best roommate horror stories, told through anecdotes and in one illustrated cartoon.
It is the end of September during her freshman year and Sarah Hiepler has just aced her first college test. As a reward, she wants to return to her room, watch a show on Netflix and maybe even take a nap.
She walks through the doors of Peyton Hall, puts her key in the lock on her door and enters her dorm room to find chaos.
Her roommate is sitting in a mess of books and papers, eating a pepperoni pizza off the floor while watching television, at full volume.
“She would always be in the room eating those pepperoni pizza things every day,” junior Hiepler said. “Lunch, dinner, she never went out.”
Hiepler’s roommate did not eat at Umphrey Lee because she hated spending time around people. Because of this, Hiepler was never allowed to bring friends to her room to hangout or study.
Hiepler said her roommate also liked to cover the walls of their room with posters of cats and lions. She would frame pictures of cats from the Internet and place them strategically throughout the room so one was always visible.
“I just saw her this week,” Hiepler , who no longer rooms with her, said. “She got a new tattoo of a dolphin and a mermaid to go with her cat tattoo.”
Senior marketing major Ivy Deibel entered the random roommate lottery the summer before her freshman year in 2011. The verdict came in July and when she opened the email from SMU housing, she started to cry. She could not pronounce the name on the screen in front of her.
Move-in day rolled around and Deibel finally got to meet her roommate, an international student from China.
“She spoke almost no English, we could barely understand each other,” she said. “I hated being in my room.”
The roommate had poor hygiene and would not allow Deibel to have any visitors in their room. The tension eventually became too much and before the semester was over, Deibel moved in with her suitemate, a change she is thankful she made.
“I would’ve had such a different year if I hadn’t switched,” she said.
Margie Anderson, a sophomore, got a text from her roommate telling her not to come home one night last year. The roommate was apparently having a fight with her boyfriend and didn’t want Anderson to be there. Finally around 1 a.m. Anderson sent her roommate a warming text that she was coming back to the dorm room. But she wasn’t ready for what she walked into.
The couple wasn’t fighting, but her boyfriend told Anderson that the roommate had hit her head and was claiming to have amnesia. But, it wasn’t true; the roommate hadn’t hit her head at all.
“She was pretending to have amnesia and not remember what he said so they would stop fighting,” Anderson said.
Anderson said her roommate wouldn’t let up the act until she threatened to get the R.A.
Christian Bender, a sports management major, got a surprise text from her roommate last January that left her and her two other roommates with an empty room in their apartment and thousands of dollars short on rent.
This roommate moved out with no warning in the middle of the year. To add insult to injury, the roommate contacted Bender’s parents along with the parents of the two other roommates. She asked each of the three parents to pay half of her rent without alerting the other parents that she was doing so. Two of the parents agreed to pay for half of the rent, making up the entire sum. The wayward roommate walked away without paying a dime.
“She emailed our parents asking them to split her part of the rent with her and they agreed,” Bender said. “She didn’t tell them so they paid her entire rent.”
Since the ordeal, Bender and her two other roommates bought a dog, Vinny, to fill the empty space. But, he doesn’t take care of the financial burden their past roommate left them with.
SMU senior Lauren Jones can remember her first encounter with her freshman year roommate like it was yesterday. Like many first-years, eager to make new friends and escape the humdrum routine of high school, decided to take her chances in the roommate lottery known as “potluck.” Jones thought her roommate would be her first college friendship but she was gravely mistaken.
After a bad breakup, Jones’ roommate threw herself into one sexually-crazed relationship after another, acquainting herself with every man on their floor.
Jones remembers one instance in particular after her roommate returned from a night out.
“She and her date went back to our room,” she said. “I woke up to them sleeping together and they didn’t stop once they realized I was awake.”
Jones, a psychology major, gritted her teeth and made it through the year. Both she and her roommate ceased communication shortly after living together and agreed to go their separate ways forever.
“She looked like an angel, but was very fake and malicious,” Jones said.
SMU junior Morgan Monferdini experienced first-hand that just because someone is sweet doesn’t mean she has common sense.
One morning Monferdini woke up to her first-year roommate spraying her with Off mosquito spray. Not something she expected in her face at 6 a.m.
She discovered that her roommate had awakened in the middle of the night craving potassium. She had eaten half a banana, leaving the rest of it to rot on the windowsill.
Ants swarmed the room, covering Monferdini’s bed and the windowsill near her head.
The roommate claims she had no idea an open banana would immediately rot and attract insects.
“She’s as sweet as can be, just a little clueless,” Monferdini said with a laugh.
Sophomore Political Science major Kayla Finstein lived in Shuttles Hall her freshman year. She had a roommate who lived on the sloppy side. She would leave clothes and school supplies out, and never picked up after herself.
“She was a hoarder and never cleaned,” she said. “I would get frustrated and clean some of it myself.”
When the room became too messy, Finstein would kick her roommate’s items out from the center of the room until she finally cleaned up.
Junior Communications major Kelsey Williams lived in Peyton Hall her freshman year. She had a roommate who was friendly, but when it was time for bed, it meant lights out.
“She was an early sleeper, so I always had to stop what I was doing so she could sleep,” she said.
Williams claims that she is non-confrontational, so she would let her roommate have her way.
Williams and her roommate eventually worked things out, and are still good friends.
Arabic, International Studies and French triple major Samantha Perry found herself getting sick frequently during her freshman year. Perry couldn’t figure out why until she found what her first-year roommate was keeping on their windowsill: a stinky compost bin.
The bin was a flower vase the size of football where her roommate would deposit garbage and the remains of her food, much of which was not organic. The contents included everything from salads, teabags and even burritos. The stench of decomposition and mold was unbearable to Perry every time she entered her McElvaney dorm room.
“It just smelled like s**t,” she said. “It was disgusting.”
When Perry asked her roommate to take the compost bin outside for the sake of her health, the environmentally conscious girl said that Perry’s immune system would just have build up to it.
When Perry asked her roommate to take the compost bin outside for the sake of her health, the environmentally conscious girl said that Perry’s immune system would just have build up to it.
One sophomore finance major had just finished lunch after a long day of class last spring when he decided to return to his dorm room. His plans were to relax and decompress, but his plans changed when he opened his door.
“I walked into the room to find my roommate and his girlfriend performing sexual acts on the floor,” said Brad, who did not want his last name used to protect the couple’s identity. “They both stopped, looked up at me and we all shared awkward eye contact.”
Brad said that he told his roommate to give him a warning if this were ever to happen again.
He said that it happened again.
