Upon entering college, you play the risky and sometimes rewarding game of gambling on a good roommate. In four-year universities, students are crammed into dorms with roommates based on questionnaires or quizzes, but in our cozy beachside community you have to take the game into your own hands.

As students roam craigslist and local message boards for a potential residence, so begins the battle to find someone tolerable to share close quarters with for the next year.

The experiences you have in college mold and shape you as a person and can have lasting impressions. Becoming roommates can make or break friendships, so the difficult task comes in finding someone you at least get along with. Because when you have someone sleeping about seven feet from you every night, your paths will cross occasionally.

I decided to take a shot at this roommate roulette last year and headed to craigslist for a place to live. Unfortunately, I was dealt a very bad hand. And the experience I gained, was my first punch to the face––literally.

My old roommate, lets call her Jane, indulged in drugs and drinking just ask much as she skipped class and slept all day. As I was coming home one evening my neighbors dropped my drunken, drugged up and disheveled roommate off in our house, saying they didn’t want to deal with her.

Already a bad sign.

Out of nowhere, hyped up on who knows what, Jane began to fling my belongings across the room and cursing in her native French. My favorite books, makeup, pictures, shoes and anything that was considered mine flew past me and smashed against the wall. I stood there in disbelief, shouting for her to stop but the damage had already been done.

Yelling in not so pretty sounding French, Jane lunged towards me. In one swift motion, she grabbed my neck and punched me square in the jaw.

In complete shock, I stood there paralyzed, but thankfully someone in my house of 12 girls had heard the commotion, grabbed me out of the room, and called SBPD.

Needless to say I didn’t sleep at home for much of the rest of the semester.

Close living situations can always cause tension, but I guess what this experience taught me is that I need to learn to better block a punch.

The time you spend in college can shape you, but the people you interact with do even more so. The people you live with now may be strangers or best friends since kindergarten, but either way you will unknowingly change each other.

You may find a roommate who is a bad seed, but these are things in life that define you. After my previous living situation, I changed as a person. Not because of my bruised jaw, but because I saw the lifestyle of some of my roommates, and realized that their actions were causing me to want to change myself.

The years you spend in college are meant to define you. You take from the experiences and the people around you, and use them to make yourself into someone you want to be. Though my previous living situation was a little tricky, I took form it that I wanted to change myself, and get the heck out of there.