The roommate conundrum

There are thousands of college students who do this internship each year. That's a lot of things to keep track of for Disney. A lot of paperwork, a lot of arrival and departure dates, a lot of everything. To help them have one less thing to worry about (and probably for other reasons as well) they do the whole roommate situation a little differently than one would expect.

Disney begins by separating the interns by three pieces of information. The first is the sex: male or female. This obviously makes sense. The second is age: over 21 (non-wellness) and under 21 (wellness). This also makes sense. They are pretty strict about their alcohol policy. Interns risk termination if they get caught underage drinking. This helps Disney keep track of the wellness interns. It also helps protect non-wellness interns from getting in trouble. The third piece of info is arrival and departure dates. At least initially, the people that you room with have to share these three things in common. It makes sense.

However, here is where the unexpected comes into play. In general, Disney does not pre-match roommates before arrival. At least, not the entire apartment. They do have an online program put into place that interns can log on to and utilize. Once logged on, the intern can choose to be randomly matched up with ONE other person. They are given the contact information for said person and begin talking. If they decide they are not compatible, they can un-match and try again. Using the same program, an intern can also match up with somebody they already know and would like to room with. The upside to the program, you will be guaranteed to room with that one person. The downside, most apartments have more than one room, and thus you will be living with more than just that one person.

Here is where the even greater unexpected comes into play. The aforementioned program is just a convenience thing for the interns. How Disney actually assigns roommates and suite-mates is this. The interns show up to check-in on their assigned days. Whomever is standing next to each other in line and share the three pieces of information (male/female, wellness/non-wellness, arrival/departure date) is then assigned to room with each other. If you do not use the online program, you are not guaranteed that you will know your roommates ahead of time.

Some people like this. They enjoy the thrill of not knowing. That's great for them. I'm a planner. I like planning a head. And I worry. I would like to get along with my roommates. If I'm not happy, I'm not gonna have a good time. Planning is necessary for me! I know others feel the same way, so here is how it works behind the scenes. You get on facebook, or another social network, and start looking. You find people who you think you can room with and you ask them if they want to share an apartment. And then, you arrange a time at check-in for everybody to show up and stand together in line. Since Disney groups you with the people standing around you in line, if you're standing next to the people you'd like to room with, you should technically not have any problems.

So this is what I did. First I started talking to people to get to know them. I found Nick and asked him if he wanted to "tentatively" room together, purposely using that word. In the weeks that followed, if I found that I really couldn't stand him, the "tentatively" would give me an out. However, in further discussions with Nick, we found that we get a long really well. We recently just officially became roommates by using the online-program.

From there, Nick and I started discussing how many people wanted in our apartment. We knew for sure we would want at least one more bedroom, so we started looking for more people. From there, we found Chris and Benji. The next question: did we want to stop at a 2-bedroom, or did we want a 3-bedroom? After some discussion, we decided that the next size bigger would be good. So we found two more men: Phil and Jeff. We just recently confirmed that Phil and Jeff would be our third bedroom. So now, we're all set.

The next step to ensure that we will all be living together is to show up at the same time for check-in. This shouldn't be hard. Technically, since each of us is officially paired, only one person from each room actually has to show up at the same time. I assume that most of us though will be there at the same time, as it's an exciting thing!