It’s a month into college, and you realize the reason you’re tired all the time isn’t because you’ve got a non-stop social life and you’re studying until all hours of the night (well, maybe in part…). No, it’s because when you finally hit the pillow at the end of the night or the early hours of the morning, you can’t fall asleep because your roommate snores. It’s not their fault, they didn’t ask for this, but neither did you. In fact, you never really had the opportunity to say you didn’t want a roommate who snores. Think about it. When you filled out that roommate selection form, was there a question that asked about snoring? No, there wasn’t. First-year roommates are always a gamble. Most of us don’t know the person we are rooming with very well or at all, so whether you went random or not, there are no guarantees. Personally, I love my roommate, she’s amazing, but I’m a light sleeper so that first night when she started snoring… well, I panicked. I called my mom, I texted all my friends and pulled out my headphones. While earplugs may have given me a livable solution, I know many people are still struggling to find a way to get a good night’s sleep. 

So if we know some people are light sleepers and others could sleep through a hurricane, why doesn’t the random roommate form ask about this? 

Getting sleep is an essential part of being a functional human being, so shouldn’t that be a priority when deciding who lives together for nine months? I think so, which is why is baffles me as to why this is not addressed on the form. Over the summer my dad kept pestering me, asking what I would do if my roommate interfered with my sleep. I repeatedly reassured him that I said I was a light sleeper on my roommate form and they wouldn’t put me with a loud sleeper, but every time I reassured him I had to push back the thought that kept popping up in my head. I might have said I was a light sleeper, but the form never did ask if people were loud sleepers. Here lies the major gap on the roommate questionnaire: you can say you are a light sleeper, but there is nowhere to say that you are a loud sleeper. So if we could just add one more question to the form, I think many more of us would get full nights of sleep.