“Are we sharing friends, or are we not?” This was one of the pressing questions Maia Wang ’26 and Charlene Peng ’26 discussed on FaceTime after finding out they’d been paired as roommates the summer before they arrived at the College. The pair decided to do weekly check-ins to make sure that they would get along — a routine especially important when sharing a flex double with a bunk bed.
Things went so well that despite initial apprehensions about compatibility, Wang and Peng quickly became close — and it stayed that way. The two were roommates again their second year in East College and currently live in adjacent apartments in Poker Flats.
Peng and Wang’s story is not unique. Generations of randomly paired roommates have gone from being strangers to best friends thanks to the fateful decisions of the Office of Campus Life.
Charlie Halverson ’26 and Graham Napack ’26 both tried to game the system to get the best possible random roommate. Napack, a self-described messy person, shifted all of his answers in the roommate form to the cleaner, go-to-bed-earlier end of the spectrum, “in an attempt to get a normal roommate,” he said. Halverson did the opposite, as he figured “all the coolest people on campus are going to be staying up late, messy, and having a good time all the time.” Their first impressions were subpar: Napack was unimpressed by Halverson’s prom post on Instagram, and all Halverson could find online about Napack were his pole vaulting scores from eighth grade. Not very enlightening. When they met on move-in day, though, things shifted. “We got along right off the bat,” Napack said. Their room became a social hub. “We called it ‘the corm,’ as in the common dorm,” said Halverson.
Napack and Halverson said they found less conventional ways to bond. “Graham took plywood and sealed every single door and window of the room from the outside,” Halverson said. “I woke up the next morning, 30 minutes before my class, to realize that I was sealed into my dorm room… I had to solve a series of 10 riddles to find the drill bit buried deep beneath my laundry basket to take off the plywood board from the door.” Halverson, allegedly an incredibly deep sleeper, only woke up once while Napack sealed the doors and went back to sleep at his request. Instead of just searching for the drill bit, Halverson solved all 10 riddles and made it to class on time. The two remain close.
Part of last year’s Willy 4 entry still lives together in Dodd House this year. Jadyn Ganss ’28, Olivia Kim ’28, Henry Reinke ’28, and Quinn McDermott ’28 occupy two doubles with a shared bathroom connecting them. McDermott and Kim began hanging out after their shared Williams Outdoor Orientation for Living as First-Years (WOOLF) trip and the group grew from there. “We were really good friends with basically everybody all throughout the floor,” McDermott said of the group. “I’m glad it happened… I think I would have had a lot less fun had I had a single.”
Kim explained that their first-year suite’s bond was unusual because it crossed many of the usual social boundaries on campus. “We all have our own friends, and they’re all on teams,” she said. “We don’t see each other outside of the room, but every night we’ll do homework together.” Reinke agreed that it’s nice to have people to come home to. It doesn’t hurt to be out of flex doubles either, he added. “We have over twice the total space that we did last year.”
Molly McWeeny ’26 and Maya Tait ’26 followed each other on Instagram the summer before they arrived on campus. The two communicated exclusively through the app before they met in the fall. “‘Oh, I’ve lost my phone for the past few weeks, so let’s keep it on Instagram,’” McWeeny said she had told her roommate. Tait was slightly horrified. “How do you just lose your phone for multiple weeks and not care?” she said. Once they moved in, however, they clicked pretty quickly. Tait recalled coming home from a bad party on the first night to find McWeeny cozy in bed reading a book. “‘We can just chill, and that’s normal,’” Tait remembered thinking. They started sharing their ‘rose, bud, thorn’ at night soon after and continued it for the rest of the year.
Teddy Palmore ’27 was thrilled to get the email about his first-year roommate Brendan Fitzgerald ’27 the summer before their first year. “Both of my parents are best friends with their random freshman year roommates, still,” Palmore said.
Fitzgerald recalled their initial conversation over the summer on Instagram. “We [realized we had] some bizarre musical intersections,” he said.
They got along well — except for one small moment of tension over some Oreos. Their snacks were communal, and one time, Fitzgerald’s dad brought Oreos that they left out in the common room. Fitzgerald wondered why the cookies were going so fast. Palmore told him it was probably just other people snacking as they passed through. “Fast forward to 2 a.m. that night, Brendan [awoke] to the sound of me rustling through his Oreos, eating the last one,” Palmore said, recalling the fallout. “I was maybe gently scolded, or more like mocked. But really, that’s the extent of trouble we had living together.”
Fitzgerald agreed. “We definitely soon found out that we were both fine with each other not being as clean as we had purported ourselves to be,” he said.
Coming home from a long day didn’t have to entail an intense conversation because they just clicked, Palmore said. “I thought from the start that Brendan was such an interesting person to talk to, and also, like, easy,” he explained.
One first-year duo to look out for is Jasper Gimpel ’29 and Cal Chen ’29. Like many of their predecessors, they had some contact on Instagram even prior to being placed together, bonding over shared music tastes. Gimpel scrolled back to their first messages: “I love your bio by the way, genuinely one of the best songs ever,” Chen had written. The song? “Once in a Lifetime” by The Talking Heads, a band they both still love. “There was more of that when we were decorating our rooms, with posters and stuff,” Chen said.
They shared that one of their secrets to getting along is being very open with one another, and cracking a few jokes doesn’t hurt, according to Chen. “We have this thing on our calendar for October,” Chen said. “It’s two tallies, [counting the days when] Jasper stays up past 1 a.m. and Cal goes to bed before 1 a.m. because our sleep schedules are totally misaligned.” He elaborated that they’ve made this difference work, however, and Gimpel agreed that they’ve both fallen into a suitable routine, respectful of one another’s hours.
Those who have found long-lasting friendships through the College’s randomized roommate assignments cited communication as one of the key aspects to their success. Kim emphasized this point: “If I do something, and Jadyn doesn’t say that it bothers her, then I don’t know that it’s bothering her. I just keep doing it.” Ganss added that establishing chore routines was crucial: “Liv fills the Brita, I take out the trash.” Wang and Peng agreed that everyone is stressed out at the College, so roommates should be okay with the little hindrances that arise from different lifestyles. “Like, learning what’s good to let go,” Wang said of the compromises the duo made.
Halverson and Napack had different thoughts about the quintessential friend group question. “Spending all your time together? No, that’s not good advice,” Napack said. “Leave your door open all the time. For those who aren’t getting along? A helpful dose of pranking.”
