I love my roommate

You never really appreciate someone until you realize they aren’t going to be around you forever.

I know that’s a feeling I certainly am getting in regards to my roommate Puja. We met each other with the online roommate search that many upperclassmen call online dating. Except its like one step beyond that, because you’re asking the other person to live with you. At first, I totally lied on my profile, claiming that I went to bed at 11 and was extremely neat. One of my best friends caught me and made me fix it, and then Puja’s profile was a perfect match to mine. Turns out that we lived in the same city and had mutual friends. It was the beginning of a great friendship!

Now we have an extremely unique relationship. We’re both pre meds and involved in some of the same organizations, so we always have common things to do. There are times when we sit next to each other in chemistry class and make a very long To Do list of things we have to get done . . . . . and then later that day our friends come over to do homework and they get their homework done while we’re too busy entertaining them to do our own!

Last semester, just spending time in the room was entertaining because of the sheer volume of people always in it. I had about 7 roommates at UT, 3 official and 4 regular unofficial ones. I actually worried that this semester would be lonely for us since it was just the two of us.
But all of this just proves two things: that the online roommate search works, and that a lot of times, roommate situations turn into friendships you’ll always cherish. I know I was worried at the start of my freshman year, but now, I can hardly imagine living in a single room again likeduring the pre-college days. Roommates are going to have an impact, and most of the time, its for the better.

The moments when we’re singing loudly to Indian music, the moments when we’re cleaning our room and pretending it’s like that all the time when our parents come, the moments when we’re feeding our friends while not doing our own work . . . these are the moments I’ll miss.

But hey, I’m fortunate in that I got a friend out of it. And if any of you know my roommate Puja, you’d know that I’m pretty lucky.