Customary here, not there.

When we are assigned to dorm rooms our freshman year, we never know what will happen.

Prime example: when I received a letter stating that I would have five suitemates instead of one roommate, I was already surprised. It wasn’t much of a stretch. I always lived with five other people in my family, but these were people totally different from me with totally different backgrounds.

When I got there on the first day, there were only two girls already there: an Italian girl from Long Island and a Hispanic girl from Miami. We were still waiting on three other suitemates and already we displayed an insanely diverse room.

Much like the Tri-State Area,
the "DMV" refers to DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

Turns out two suitemates dropped out, but my roommate came back to the room: a black girl from Washington DC.


As we started to make friends and fill in the room as the semester went on, we welcomed another girl from DC and a girl a town not so far from mine in Pennsylvania.

But the changes didn’t end there. One roommate moved out (back to Long Island) and we welcomed my blonde friend from New Jersey into the suite.

After a first semester of exhaustion, I made it a new routine to go to bed by 12 AM every-night. Three other girls in the suite, not to mention the girl that lives across the hall, stayed up for hours later, laughing and joking and carrying on.

Somehow, I slept through it.

My suitemates would order pizza to the room at least twice a week. I made it a point to eat the best food I could find in the dining hall.

They listened to music I had never heard before.

Sometimes, when my roommate talked to me, I had to ask her to repeat herself two or three times. Her DC accent was so thick I couldn’t understand it.

When you’re thrown into situations like this, living with strangers, you never know what you’re going to get. I, in a sense, got a tour of the whole country. I got to see different types of ways people live their daily lives that are so different from the way I always did at home.

And I grew accustomed to it.

Now, when I go home, I find it strange. When my parents go to bed at 10 or 11 at night and I’m left in the quietness, it is almost creepy. I moved to St. John’s and developed a whole new daily routine. And at the end of it, I’ll have to get myself comfortable again with how I always lived prior to this.

People are not difficult to mold. There is a difference between molding and changing and that is what I learned through dorm life. I didn’t change, and clearly my suitemates didn’t either. We all just molded our lives around each other. And we will all have to do it again this summer, and next year, and many times to follow.