I never shared a room growing up. My sister had her own room on the opposite end of the house and my parents occupied the room across the hall. I couldn’t even share my room with my cat because if I didn’t firmly lock her outside my door, she would wake me up in the wee hours of the morning by sharpening her claws on my furniture- a noise that sounded like a horrible mix of nails on a chalkboard and an electric drill that still haunts me to this day. So, the summer going into my freshman year of college, I was both nervous and excited to get a real-life roommate, an idea that was shattered when I received my housing information, which notified me that I had been placed in a single. And not even one of those two room pseudo-double singles that have a connecting door so you have a half-roommate, but a proper solitary single with just myself for company. At the end of freshman year when it neared the season of the housing lottery, I attempted to try to live in a quad the following year. My would-be quad mates and my lottery numbers were quite dismal so this plan fell through rather quickly. Instead, we settled on getting four singles situated next to each other, and I lived another school year in the privacy of my own room. Cue junior year of college when, at last, I get to experience the glories of living with a roommate. And I wasn’t just handed one roommate, I got six. Despite it only being the second week of school, I have already learned the perks of living with suite mates for the first time.
1. When there is a bug in the common room, I may still have to be the one to kill it, but at least now I have people shrieking at me and pointing, something I consider helpful moral support.
2. There is an abundance of food in my life. I will never go hungry in my current living situation. My roommate perpetually offers me bread; we probably have about five whole loaves of bread floating around our room at any given time, and the other day one of my suite mates brought home a tin, the size of a small house, full of pasta from Trinity Restaurant. This being said, food also disappears freakishly fast. Even though we assumed we could survive off the pasta for days, it was gone within 24 hours.
3. Moving in is a team building exercise. Carrying three couches up four flights of stairs is an accomplishment I fully intend to write on my resumé. We had to rope in two unsuspecting sophomores and a visiting tennis recruit in order to be successful in this endeavor, but I feel accomplished nonetheless.
4. As irrational as this fear may be, I don’t have to worry about someone breaking into my dorm and murdering me in my sleep because seven on one is much better odds than one on one.
5. Someone will likely have whatever I need, no matter how random it is. From safety pins to a hammer to a severed clown foot for a Halloween costume, if I lost or forgot mine, someone else probably has it.
6. Last but not least, I always have someone to vent to, complain to, ask advice from, and drive to Walmart at 11 P.M. with. And more importantly, someone will always be there to bless me when I sneeze. 
