Brandon Moyse | Matchmaker, matchmaker, try a little harder

Remember The Odd Couple? If you're like me, then probably not. It was a 1965 Neil Simon play (later a movie, then a TV show) about a neurotic neat freak who moved in with a shameless slob. Hilarity ensued.

Every year, many freshmen unwillingly enact their own little "Odd Couple" revival, only it's not so funny for them. Kosher kids get put with goys, chain smokers with asthmatics, early birds with night owls. It might be irritating at first, but after a few months, the situation could turn into a cold or hot war, serious enough to spark a room-change request.

The University's policy seems to be: Lock two people in a room for a year and hope that the odds are in their favor and they will come out best friends, regardless of their personality types and backgrounds. There's a plan.

(Full disclosure: I got along fine with my roommate freshman year, but suffice to say, we wouldn't have been matched up on eHarmony.com).

"Diversity is valued here," Ellie Rupsis, associate director of housing administration, explained. "We're providing students with an experience. . There's value to living with someone who's not like you."

But Penn is a pretty diverse place already. In between classes, extracurricular activities and the rest of a 30-person hall, you're bound to run into lots of people that aren't like you. Frankly, I don't see the marginal benefit in being crammed into a 12-by-14 foot room for eight months with someone totally different from you for the sake of "diversity." Moreover, the diversity argument falls flat because roommates are randomly assigned - there is no attempt to create diversity within rooms or halls; rather, the diversity comes from randomness.

Part of the problem is the pre-frosh perception, "If I don't get into the Quad or Hill, I'll have no friends and my college experience will suck." Consequently, Penn's electronic housing system prioritizes room type and college house and essentially disregards everything else (the results are reviewed manually but changes are rarely made except in extenuating circumstances).

Call me naive, but I think that with whom you live has a greater impact on your college experience than where you live. And the fact is that people who live in Kings Court, Gregory, Stouffer and the high rises freshman year turn out OK.

Other universities use alternative roommate-matching processes to match freshman-year roommates. Davidson College in North Carolina administers Myers-Briggs personality tests and lifestyle questionnaires to incoming freshmen. Applications are then manually sorted and compatible personalities are matched up using notes and housing preferences.

"It's labor-intensive, but we have been doing it 25-plus years and have had great results," Debby Harrison, Facilities and Operations coordinator at Davidson, wrote in an e-mail. "Our aim is for diverse halls, not diverse roommates."

Going a step further in trying to maximize compatibility, 15 universities use WebRoomz, a program where incoming freshmen fill out an extensive questionnaire and can then self-assign roommates - not unlike an online dating service.

Instituting a completely manual process like Davidson's may be unrealistic, given that Penn's freshman class is five times the size as Davidson's. And Webroomz, which costs $35,000, is an unnecessary expense.

"In looking at our peer institutions, Penn gives students a range of options that is unheard of," said Pamela Robinson, associate director of College Houses and Academic Services. "At other schools, you're told where to live. At Penn, you can choose. We think a lot of students would be unhappy if we took that choice away."

Perhaps a two-step process, where students are electronically sorted by location preference and then manually matched up within each house, is something Penn can consider. I understand that you can't make everyone happy all of the time, but it doesn't seem like too much of an undertaking to try.

Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too, and this is one of those instances.

Brandon Moyse is a College junior from Montreal. He is the former senior sports editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. What Aboot It, Eh? appears on Thursdays. His email address is moyse@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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