With the housing selection process for the 2014–15 school year underway, some students are using a new roommate finder system on MySlice if they do not yet have someone to live with on campus next year.

The system opened Jan. 18 and was available daily through March 19. Now that the housing selection process has started, the roommate finder is only open on weekends since the room selection page and the roommate finder page cannot be active at the same time, said Eileen Simmons, director of housing.

Last year, the housing office opened a Facebook page for Syracuse University students to use to find roommates. The new system on MySlice allows for more continuity as each student answers a questionnaire before searching for a roommate, Simmons said.

“The Facebook page had no connection to our housing system,” Simmons said. “And not all students have Facebook pages, so management was very cumbersome to keep up with.”

The new roommate finder is also less public than last year’s Facebook page and ensures that only SU students can access and join the page, she said.

Students can access the roommate finder on the housing page on MySlice. Under the tab, “personal preferences,” students can answer questions about themselves, such as: whether or not you are a smoker, your room type and campus preference and your contact information, Simmons said. Students must set their profile to public so that it is visible to other students on the roommate finder, she said.

Students must be eligible to participate in the housing lottery and have agreed to the terms and conditions of SU housing on MySlice to be able to participate, Simmons said.

Simmons said about 900 students have entered their profile on the roommate finder system, compared to about 200 who joined last year’s Facebook page. The housing office will evaluate the roommate finder and make changes for next year after the housing selection period has concluded.

“I just filled it in and hoped for the best,” said Morgan Dudzinski, a freshman communication and rhetorical studies major who used the roommate finder this year. She said she connected with the person who became her future roommate two to three days after she created a profile on the site.

“We started talking back and forth and messaging each other, and it’s working out wonderfully,” Dudzinski said, who called the roommate finder “a great idea with a little bit of tweaking necessary.”

She suggested that the program’s creators add more questions to the program with more specific content in the future.

“I wanted it to be more specific because as I was scrolling through the site the first time not a lot of people put in personal descriptions,” Dudzinski said. “I would’ve felt more comfortable looking for someone who had information about themselves.”

There is also an optional area where students can share any other information about themselves and their preferences, Dudzinski said. For example, she said she felt it was important to say that she is studious because she likes to do her homework in her room.

Other students, such as Tim Wright, a sophomore television, radio and film major, felt the new system was more organized than the Facebook page, but could be better publicized.

“I just stumbled upon it when I was looking for housing on MySlice,” he said. “I’m not exactly sure how they would promote it — that’s kind of the problem.”

Wright said he went on the roommate finder Facebook page last year and likes the idea of relocating the page to MySlice. The Facebook page was “chaos that wasn’t really organized.”

“It was difficult to find someone who fit your situation without scrolling for 20 minutes,” he added.

Although he agrees the questionnaire should be more extensive, he is glad students who need a roommate have a forum to connect.

“As it is right now, it has potential,” Wright said. “They might not know what are the right questions to ask. I think it will take a few years to work out all the kinks in it.”

Published on March 24, 2014 at 2:03 am

Contact Kristen: kaeskow@syr.edu