"I wasn't looking at the names when I matched them up," she says. "It was quite coincidental, based upon their interests, both academic and extracurricular."

Does it work?

Jenny L. Allard, a Matthews Hall proctor, praises the room assignment system.

"Sometimes I'm amazed at how well people get along," she says. "I've never had cases where roommates could not get along. Even if they had differences, they were able to live together and maybe parted ways at the end of the year."

"[The assistant deans] don't want to deal with 1,600 people who are dissatisfied with their roommates, so you bet they do a lot of work on the front end to avoid problems," Allard says.

The deans often succeed in creating compatible rooming groups, like the Massachusetts Hall suite of Runa Islam '00.

"We're all really good friends," Islam says. "Even from the beginning, I thought it was really sort of ideal."

According to Islam, she and her suitemates get along because they are flexible and have similar interests.

"We all take special care to know what's going on in our lives," Islam says. "Last term if someone had a mid-term or a paper, we'd put a note up on our door to wish them luck."

Islam says she is not sure how the deans assembled her room.

According to one of Islam's roommates, Cameron "Camy" A. Kinloch '00, Dean of Freshman Elizabeth S. Nathans visited their room during Freshman Week.

Kinloch says Nathans told them that height was one criteria for the roommate combination because of the dorm's slanting ceilings. Islam, the tallest of the roommates, is 5'4."

But as most students know, not all rooming groups can get along.

"Our situation is sort of rare," Islam says, adding that she and her three roommates are planning to live together again next year. "I don't know a lot of people who are really happy with their rooming situation."

Even when roommates are unhappy, the College encourages them to stay together.