rooming with someone from your program?

[svh]

Can people with experience tell me if they think this is a good idea, or is it better to room with someone from a different department?

[Ennue]

I haven't done this, but my advice is this: it can be fine to room with someone from your program if you already know them, e.g. sometime after your first year, and you don't have exactly the same classes and the same office. I definitely wouldn't recommend rooming with someone you don't know yet your first year. You'll need a place to blow off steam, and it would be nice if 'home' was that place. Also, being roommates comes with its own challenges and irritations, and you don't want your need for clean dishes or their precise accounting of who paid for what to influence your grad school life!

[fuzzylogician]

I've lived with a fellow grad student staring my first year (she was second year) and it worked out fine. We didnt know each other ahead of time but we met when I visited and then talked a few times and decided we have a similar view of how roommate situations should be. We have similar schedules, though we don't take the same classes, but we understand each other's concerns and time constraints and we both try to accommodate each other's deadlines. It hasn't been all that different from other roommate situations I had in the past where I lived with working people and students from other departments.

[Daria Morgendorffer]

I've done it before and I really didn't like it. We were in the same classes all day and we saw each other all night/weekend, so we started to get on each other's nerves. Plus, I felt way too much pressure about studying, like, "she's studying, maybe I'm not studying enough, she's studying differently than I am, maybe I'm doing it wrong" etc. and it got to be really old. My preference is to live with someone who is equally hard-working and serious as I am, but in a completely different field.

[Eigen]

A lot of my department live together- probably about half. It works out quite well for everyone that I know.

No one tried it before their second year, though, so they all knew each other going into it.

My wife and I are slitting our house with someone from my cohort, and it works out great. We're at opposite ends of the department, but we have a lot of the same frustrations and stresses, so it's really helpful to have someone there that knows what you're complaining at and you can vent to.

We also knew each other for two years before we moved in together, so we had a pretty good idea that we would be compatible- we just re-signed a year lease, so it's worked out quite well.