Guest Column: My roommate was 6’5” and two of me

When most freshmen are assigned roommates over the summer, I assume they were as excited as I was. We all immediately search their names on Facebook to try to judge the people we will be living with. I did not find my assigned roommate on Facebook at first — I found him on ESPN.com. He was a nationally ranked football prospect.

For me, this was the most exciting thing that could have happened. We exchanged numbers after he contacted me on Facebook, and we spent much of the summer texting and getting to know each other. Before I arrived on campus, I was convinced that we would get along great.

And this much I tell my tours. I tell them that we did, in fact, get along great. We liked the same music, played the same video games and even sat around whining about our girlfriends together (what guys actually do when we tell girls that we are bro-ing out), enjoying one another’s company. I emphasize to my tours that without random roommate assignment, I would have sought out someone similar to me and never would have gotten to know the members of the football team that I know now. I joke that people probably see me talking to them and think, “He must be the kicker,” except that I am far too small, even to be a kicker. I talk about how much I learned from my freshman-year roommate and how I would not have had that experience without the element of chance that Princeton keeps in the equation.

I do not lie to my tours. But I also do not tell them that I no longer live with that same roommate. I do not tell them that, despite the fact that I considered us very close friends, it was taken for granted that we would not live together during our sophomore year.

Football players have a practice schedule that is, in a word, anti-college. In five words, it is “a seriously ridiculous schedule, man.” They wake up at 6 a.m. for morning meetings. Some go straight to breakfast and then early morning classes. Others, like my former roommate, would return to the room at 8:45 a.m., 15 minutes before I woke up. I can only imagine how frustrating my 9:00 a.m. alarm became for him. While I was surprisingly able to sleep through his 6 a.m. wake-up, he was a much lighter sleeper than I was and would fall back into bed at 8:45 a.m., knowing that he had, at best, 14 minutes and 30 seconds of uninterrupted respite ahead of him.

This was not fair to him. But it would not be any fairer if I had to wake up at 6:00 a.m. alongside him. So while this is a clearly difficult scenario, we made it work for two full semesters of school in our one-room double. I knew he was not always happy with my alarm, especially my tendency to hit the snooze button in my sleep and my having no recollection of doing so when he told me about it in the afternoon. Still, he was a good roommate and an easy guy to live with, even after all the trouble we caused each other. (Read: ... all the trouble I caused him, except that one time I had a Spanish exam the next morning, and then he was causing the trouble.)

He did not have a choice. He was not the obnoxious roommate who chooses to wake up obscenely early and then whines when I am up late. He was not the unfortunate random assignment that makes a mess of the room and breaks ground rules set out by our residential college adviser during freshman week. Still, we weren’t compatible roommates for a second year.

This had nothing to do with our personalities. It had everything to do with the schedule that the football team imposes on its members. I will not make generalizations about all sports, since I am not familiar with all of their schedules, but I will say that my roommate and I were practically a binary system. I woke up at 10:00 a.m. and went to sleep at 4:00 a.m. He woke up at 6:00a.m., went back to sleep at 9:00 a.m., woke up again at 12:00 p.m. and went to sleep at 1:00 a.m. This sort of conflict made it essentially impossible for us to live together.

However, this is not intended to be my personal sob story, nor a lament that I am not cool enough to be a roommate and close friend of a football player (though, that is true). Students — and the administration — take issue with the often self-isolating or restrictive social groups at Princeton. I know that I have complained that athletes as a whole tend to run in their own circles and ignore much of the rest of campus. This is not one group’s fault, and while I hold students like me (non-athletes) and athletes somewhat accountable for the divide, I have written this column to point out that the schedule of the football team is equally accountable.

My roommate did not live with me his sophomore year; he lived with three other football players. This year (our junior year), he lives with two other football players. I currently live with two a cappella singers. Like me, my roommates rehearse until after 12:00 a.m. and sleep until 30 minutes before our first lecture at 10:00 a.m.

This is exactly the kind of social stratification that many students criticize. But think how convenient this new arrangment has made things for my former roommate — when his alarm goes off, his roommates also need to get up. They nap together and zombie-bike (If you have ever been awake at 6:30 a.m. and seen athletes crossing campus, you will understand what zombie-biking is.) There is no reason why he would not live with these other football players.

To further prove the difficultly of living with football players, I will turn my freshman year problem on its head. Because now, my freshman year roommate lives with two other football players, and, due to injury, he is no longer on the football team. So, of course, who gets the single in their triple? My former roommate does, because it would be so difficult for him to room with two football players, given their schedules.

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I think there is a divide between Princeton’s varsity athletes and much of the rest of campus. I think sports teams that practice only in the afternoon, after class, do a better job of integrating themselves with the general student body. I know that the football team members and coaches will argue that they need more time than the 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. slot they are allotted. But why not have meetings happen at 10:30 p.m.? Or give football players priority on scheduling their labs and precepts? They could then meet between 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., when most teams stop practice to allow team members to take night classes.

This is not a football-specific issue, but I cannot think of any friend of mine on the football team that does not live exclusively with other varsity athletes. Princeton does not let athletes live together during freshman year to encourage diversity, or else I never would have been asked to live with a football player. So we can assume the University does not want this to be the norm in the following three years either. But athletes living with non-athletes is currently rare beyond the freshman year.

I do not want our football team to suffer simply for the cause of allowing “muggles” (what athletes call non-athletes) to live with football players. But, while depriving our football team of normal college-life hours, we also deprive our football team the ability to take part in the diverse community that the residential colleges and Princeton intend to create.

Plus, we deprive our community of the diversity football players bring. Some of them are really great guys, as I always mention on my tours. Cottage list, here I come.