When you get home from school, what’s the first thing you do? Some people sit on the couch and kick their feet up or take their books out to hunker down for work. Some say hello to their housemate and sit down to talk about their day. For just over two months this semester, I’d get in, grab something to eat and walk straight back out. 

Despite the many variations in students’ home habits, dealing with a roommate you don’t get along with is essentially a fight-or-flight situation. My own flight response fell just short of convincing my studious friends that I lived at Leavey Library. But it’s a response crafted through years of fighting unfortunate circumstances and bad decisions. 

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So, if you find yourself once again facing the prospect of living with your new hermit of a roommate who only ever opens their mouth to complain, it’s time to move. Luckily, Housing recognizes that you need to have a good space to thrive and offers its solution: reassignment. Unluckily, it’s a woeful system that can leave you feeling trapped.

The reassignment process seems easy enough: a student goes to one of the many Customer Service Centers dotted across on-campus housing structures and requests to be reassigned from their current posting. Then, a manager informs the student of potential openings and room sizes. No more than one or two forms later, they’re no longer living with their hermit.

The key problem with reassignment becomes clear when you start asking questions, though. Namely, CSC is unable to give any real information about your prospective new roommates. A student might ask a CSC member for anything that might help identify if their next roommate will be Hermit 2.0, and the best they might be told is, “Sorry, we don’t have that information.” 

The reason for this secrecy might be chalked up to privacy or not wanting somebody to game the system. It isn’t unheard of for somebody to deliberately sign up for a place where they don’t want to live with the intention of guaranteeing their place in Housing, only to reassign with another friend once the semester starts. 

Online reviews of those who have been through the reassignment process are largely negative, suggesting it depends on the luck-of-the-draw.

“I went random,” Reddit user u/Acceptable-One581 said. “Worst experience ever. Roommate was awful. Got a room reassignment and got another awful roommate.”

Another user, u/anonymous_pengui, wrote that “experiences vary — some people get lucky, others don’t.”

The carefulness with which a student might approach taking up a new spot is borne out of more than them just thinking the worst of their roommate. If a student has made the decision to reassign in the middle of the semester, they’ve already accepted a certain level of disruption to their life by relocating. It’s also unlikely that, come the third or fourth week, there will be a spot open at USC Village (think more along the lines of Gateway, unless you’re very lucky), so there’s no ambitious thinking involved, either.

Students already know that by going into the process, they are not getting the best option, but that’s something they accept to get out of their current situation. But the way reassignment is currently set up, they also have to accept the fact that it’s a risk — that they may end up in a situation just as bad as before, or worse. 

This risk seems unnecessary. Housing holds the information about who is assigned to each room and should allow this information to be given more freely to those who are seeking to reassign. Basic information, such as demographics and a bio, that everybody gets to see on the housing portal would suffice. Information on why the previous tenant left would be even more beneficial.

Quetzalli Vergara, a senior majoring in environmental studies, recalled how disagreements with her roommate in off-campus housing resulted in her spending more time away from home and “dropping a class … because I just couldn’t get work done.” 

After reassigning to a more satisfactory situation, she said a background knowledge of who she was living with was key to cultivating a successful living situation.

“It’s just [about] really knowing those people beforehand,” Vergara said. “[Compared to] the random roommates [that] I had nothing to know them off of, not even to brace myself like what am I in store for this semester.”

Moreover, if we’re going to address broader realities, it’s worth mentioning that students pursuing off-campus housing are upperclassmen who usually have an established set of friends with whom they’ve decided to live. Housing deals almost exclusively with freshman and sophomore students who are still finding their footing in college.

Freshmen and sophomores in Housing dorms come from a hugely diverse set of backgrounds. Some of them, like myself, came to Los Angeles for the first time to pursue studies at the University. Should they be unlucky enough to be in an unhealthy living situation, those students need to feel empowered by Housing to make the informed choice to move. Instead, the department only offers a lack of information about what their options truly are. 

Without the assurance of knowing who their new roommates might be, those students may choose not to reassign — and then the mental toll of a poor living situation remains. Who accounts for the years after that, if students undermine their gut instinct and fall into a cycle of bad habits? 

USC Housing is unreasonable to expect those students to be strong enough to make that decision to move at their own risk, when it holds the information students need to make an informed decision, rather than have them roll the dice.