best way to find a place to live & roommate?

[frankdux]

there seems to be a good number of sites set up for this, but does anybody have any reliable experience with any one of them in particular? any additional advice is welcome.

[fuzzylogician]

When I visited MIT, the DGS gave me the email address they use to write all of their grad students together. I used it to write a mass-email introducing myself and asking if anyone was looking for roommates or knew of a vacancy. It's been circulating for less than a week and I've already had someone write back to me with an offer. I hope that finding a place through reliable people from my department will increase the chances that I find something decent.

[TulipOHare]

Craigslist!

[rising_star]

Craig's List, the local alternative weekly newspaper (how I find the best roommate ever), the school's newspaper, the offcampus housing website if your school has one, a grad student listserve...

[kahlan_amnell]

To find a place to live, first check if the school has a website with information about off campus housing. They might have ads, or a list of apartment complexes, or other similar usefull things.

As for finding a roomate, I have avoided roomates in grad school. I've had such bad luck with the roomates I had in college that I didn't want to go through the hassle. You might want to consider if having a roomate is really worth it to you cost wise considering the possible annoyance and distraction.