*Responses were edited for length and clarity.
Her Campus Columbia Barnard asked for your roommate confessions. We were not disappointed. Disgusted, horrified, and full of questions, yes, but not disappointed.
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“One of my suitemates not only left used sanitary pads on the floor of our bathroom, but also completely soaked one of our towels (like. sopping wet) and then stuffed it into the bathroom trash can instead of drying it out or something. it was a wild ride.” —Barnard 2019
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“My roommate shat on the floor. Twice. Enough said.”—SEAS 2020
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“My roommate told me to quiet down when I was having an asthma attack and that she couldn’t sleep with all my coughing. The asthma attack was caused by a perfumed humidifier I had told her not to use because i was allergic to it. Instead of sticking up for myself I spent a few hours outside until I could breathe normally again and unplugged the air humidifier of death, which she was then mad about the next morning…”—Barnard 2022
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“Roommate has a bottle of anonymous yellow liquids in the fridge. I think it’s pee.”—CC 2021
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“My roommate’s cat pees on my bed and she won’t clean up after it. Emotional support animal my ass.”—SEAS 2020
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“I had gone to sleep. I thought she was going to sleep. But no…she was waiting for me to fall asleep and then brought her boyfriend up so they could do the nasty. They were not quiet. That was not fun to wake up to. Nor was it the first time it happened. Only three weeks left, three weeks left…”—Barnard 2021
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“My roommate hoards food. She will buy a million things from the store and just let them rot, without ever eating them. Sometimes I come home to find lemons “drying” on the counter for some weird brew she’s going to make. She also brings food from the dining halls, stuffed into giant freezer bags, and I am left in charge of playing the game of figuring out where the weird smell in the fridge is coming from.”—CC 2022
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“Freshman year I lived in one of those Brooks quads ,which is 4 people in one rectangular room. Someone was always home no matter what time of day. This lack of privacy led to my roommate with bed directly opposite to me to masturbate often with 1 or more people less than 10 feet away from her. Gotta get that nut I guess.”—Barnard 2020
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“My current roommate plucks his pubes once a week on our couch. He’s not good at picking up after himself.”—GS 2022
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“My freshman year, I was in a two-bedroom quad, and the girl with whom I was sharing my room was extremely eccentric. Our bedroom had bunk beds (with me on top, of course) and the rest of the room was so small that the two of us could not stand in there at the same time. So sometime in October, around 10:00pm, and I’m laying on my top bunk finishing up a paper. My roommate comes in, shuts our bedroom door—remember how small our bedroom is—and sits on the floor. She looks up at me and says “I just need to let this out.” At this point, I am completely unsure of what is going to happen so I just say “Okay.” She grabs her phone and starts playing this instrumental music. After a few moments she starts singing (and not well). As she keeps singing, I finally recognize the song as Ave Maria. This lasts for about three minutes, with me on the top bunk, unable to escape, until she finally stops and looks at me and says “Thank you” before leaving our bedroom and shutting the door once more. We never spoke of this moment again. (Bonus: one of our other roommates came in at the tail end of the song and asked “what is that horrible noise?”).”—Barnard 2020
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“Oh boy, where to start. He left a whole raw chicken laying uncovered in the fridge for 5 days, and has done this on at least 4 separate occasions. He sits in his underwear in the common area. He never uses headphones and always watches TV super loud. He stays up until 3 a.m. watching documentaries on Michael Jackson conspiracy theories. He uses the bathroom with the door open on the reg. He wakes me up at 8 a.m. every morning with his stupid loud ass fruit juicing machine. He always interrupts me and never shuts up whenever I’m watching Gordon Ramsay, which is a massive no go.”—GS 2020
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“My freshman year roommate reported me to the RA for leaving hair in the shower. When that didn’t work, she went to the head of ResLife and eventually the Dean of the College… when none of those people disciplined me, she requested a formal mediation between us THREE WEEKS before the school year ended. Oh, and she also used to lock me out of the room when I’d go to throw something away/get water and then pretend to not hear me when I would knock on the door.”—Barnard 2021
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“My roommate has poop anxiety so he makes me and my suitemates leave the room every time he needs to shit. Somehow I got roped into living with him again next year.”—SEAS 2022
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“My first year roommate and I lived in a Brooks walk through double (dingle), and she was the absolute worst. Having part of your room feel like a single while another part is open to a roommate is weird, but she made it unbearable. She constantly “borrowed” (AKA took) my stuff without asking and sometimes never returned it or returned it broken. She would sleep with the lights on because she was scared of the dark (???), always listened to music and TV incredibly loudly (without headphones) at all hours of the day, night, morning. She would set loud and obnoxious alarms at random hours and would sleep through them sometimes for 30 minutes at a time. She was completely unresponsive to our RA and I even had to get Residential Life involved, but I ended up having to finish the year living with her and put up a very, very thick noise and light blocking curtain between us.”—Barnard 2019
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“I was living on 115th with two of my besties from Barnard when we found a girl from Boston interested in taking over our fourth roommates’ lease. She seemed excellent even through the first two weeks after she arrived, and then fuckening began. Things would go missing—plates, then food…then it progressed to medication (rx) and alcohol. Despite calling her out on all the above things continued to disappear, but we only had a few months left until our lease expired so we decided to deal with it as as best we could. The final straw was the night a group of us came home, and I discovered that the 100 dollar bottle of champagne I bought for my boyfriend, who had just finished his SEAS exams, had disappeared. In addition to that already-bad-enough-roommate-on-roommate crime, was a half avocado with a bite taken out of it, left to rot in our here-to-fore pristine kitchen. I mean, even if I could discount everything else that had happened…what kind of savage takes a bite out of an avocado and puts it back in the fruit/veggie bowl?!.”—GS Alumni
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“I have a LOT of tea, but the story people pretty unanimously agree is disgusting is that my roommate had a support dog which peed on their bed TWICE and they still continued to sleep on those sheets…the same sheets they had on their bed from August move-in to March and not once washed.”—Barnard 2021
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“I walked in on my freshman year roommate fucking our TA…it was an awkward semester from then on.”—CC 2021
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“One time my roommate farted so badly in his sleep it woke me up.”—CC 2021
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“My roommate has this ex boyfriend who is doing a fifth year in high school because he’s a football player, and he’s taking credits now so he can take 2 classes a semester or something next year. He comes down from New Jersey EVERY. SINGLE. WEDNESDAY. They fight about their breakup (they both cheated on each other constantly), and then have sex. I come back from the library and he is ALWAYS wearing my robe and drinking my Keurig. I gave him the robe after two weeks, but for my birthday he got me a new robe. However, this dumbass is so stupid he did the monogram wrong and put the middle initial as the large one. I get questions every time I wear it now…Despite the new robe, I was pissed, so I coughed in the Brita filter and put backwash in it so she got mono over spring break and ruined her trip to Florida.”—Barnard 2022
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“My roommate gives oral sex to rotisserie chickens. We eat chicken every single Friday, so this happens a lot. I wasn’t aware until I came back to our suite earlier on a Friday since my class was cancelled, and he was going to pound town on the chicken that he was expecting me to eat that night. Never living with a straight again.”—CC 2020
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“Every time my roommate goes out to a frat party (every weekend) she takes a huuuuuge dump on the floor on my side of the room. Can’t wait for a new roommate.”—Barnard 2022
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“My roommate’s aunt came one weekend and gave him a sponge bath. I put in a housing change the same day.” —SEAS 2020
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“I had a roommate who would regularly set alarms for 3:30 a.m., because she procrastinated a lot and would only sleep from like midnight-3:30 on nights when she had assignments due so she could finish them. The worst part is that she would often not wake up to the sound of the alarm, so it would wake me and I would have to get up and wake her.” —Barnard 2019