My freshman year of college I was assigned two random roommates who ended up being nice girls. We were a fun mix of majors: digital media and arts, Spanish, and English. Our classes, homework, tests, and professors were all incredibly different, and while we complained about the same general education courses, we could also discuss our own unique experiences.

Today I’m a junior majoring in English and I’ve still never lived with another English major. My roommates for the last two years have been music and government majors who, on paper, don’t have a lot in common with me. They spend their time in choir and working on spy-like group projects and come back to the dorm to find me attempting to hand write my first novel. We’ve never had a class with the same professors since our gen eds. Yet, living with people who don’t know the details of being an English major has been awesome.

We get to tell each other fun stories about our days, describing professors and classes that are foreign to the others, which only makes the story more enjoyable.

Even though we’ve never experienced the exact same classes and professors, we can still empathize when something goes wrong. Just because I’ve never studied Russian doesn’t mean I can’t comfort my stressed roommate when she comes home drowning in homework. Despite having never sung in a college choir, I can still celebrate with my roommate when she comes home on top of the world from a great rehearsal.

If we were all English majors, we wouldn’t have those unique experiences. I wouldn’t have learned how to empathize with people having such a different college experience. And we’d be tempted to compare and result in negative conclusions: I got an A in ancient literature, what do you mean it’s hard? You must not be studying hard enough.

Having different majors means we get important time apart as well. Everyone needs time apart, even roommates, and going off every day to different classes and different activities means that we have that crucial time. It means that we look forward to seeing each other when we come home because we’ve been apart all day. If we had the same majors, we’d leave the dorm only to end up in the same classes. We’d get sick of each other by the end of the day and get frustrated with the frequency.

Having different majors gives us each a unique role in the dorm. I live in an apartment style dorm now, which holds 7 people, and some of us have different majors. Four of us have the same major, which means that when someone needs help writing a paper, they come to me. I’m the resident English major. When I have a question about what’s going on politically, I go to the two government majors, who have different opinions on what’s happening in the world and know how to discuss those differences. When the psychology major needs an actress for a short video on addiction, she goes to the communications major who’s comfortable in front of people and a camera. When the two music majors have concerts, we can show up as support. We’re not music majors with our own concerts.

Living with roommates of different majors has been the best part of college. It gives me people to tell stories to, has taught me empathy, and given me an individual role in my little family. So who are you living with next year?