With no place to hide, roommates see our reality

Before coming to college, I didn't want a roommate. Sure, based on answers to deeply personal questions such as "What kind of music do you listen to?" the Housing Department thinks we'd get along. But I, my glass unsurprisingly half-empty, equated the process to arranged marriage or prison. In retrospect, I admit I didn't want to grow up. I didn't want to share or compromise or listen at all times of the day. I didn't want a random person to become a formative part of my Princeton career.

When someone lives with you, there's no place to hide. As a perpetually anxious freshman ("Hargadon accidentally accepted me!"), that's all I wanted to do. Some of us come here thinking this is our opportunity to remake ourselves. I can become an improved me! Right — that plan crumbled on the second day. Living with someone magnifies both your flaws. It's like living with family, only worse because she had no reason to care about me or not to make my life absolutely miserable. That's what frustrated me most about her: I couldn't take her for granted. And as she realized things about me — like my anxiety in large groups, ineptitude at conflict resolution and unreasonable expectations of others — I more fully realized them too. Wakeup call: You're not the mature, omniscient adult you thought you were at sixteen!

It's not easy to get along with someone who enables you to reach negative realizations about yourself. Our room wasn't always exactly the happiest place on campus. We couldn't even do stereotypical roommate things such as share clothes (we're about six sizes apart), or shoes (likewise). But we did share general freshman anxieties, and found striking similarities in our tales about former boyfriends, the degree of our high school band geekiness and the tendency for walls to — ahem — bump into us. And we have both been, at some point in our lives, widely mistaken to be little boys. For the entire year, we couldn't hide. She would walk in to see my desk covered in crumpled tissues and ask, "What's wrong?" the question leading to those long conversations it's so hard to make time for. After months of laughing, arguing, procrastinating and talking ourselves out, we decided to room together again.

I think there's something to say about people who struggle to like each other, fight and clash and then go on to become among each other's closest friends. Often, circumstance is what chooses the people in our lives. In this Princeton bubble where many things don't parallel the workings of the real world, it's refreshing to find a situation that does.

Three decades ago in Korea, my father took classes at night and worked at a tool factory by day to support himself through college. Any spare time went to studying or sleeping; his college friendships were brief and lacked depth. Sometimes the temptation is strong for me, carefree and unemployed, to inadvertently let my undergraduate years become similar. Work, eat, sleep. Repeat. But I resist it.

My time at Princeton is almost half over. In these tumultuous, thrilling, trying two years I feel that I have grown and changed for the better, less because of my classes and more because of the people — professors, classmates, friends, and that random person who became a formative part of my Princeton career.

I'll be halfway across the globe this summer. I'm going to miss my roommate.

Julie Park is a sophomore from Wayne, N.J.