Anxious to escape from my young life as fully as possible, my senior year of high school came and I applied to a number of far-away schools with journalism programs that seemed impressive to my teenage brain, such as The University of Rochester, The University of Chicago and Oberlin College.

But ultimately, I ended up going to a Tier I liberal arts school named Skidmore College (affectionately nicknamed by students as “Smokemore”, due to being the #1marijuana-smoking school in the country at that time, but I wouldn’t be aware of or understand the meaning of that moniker for a long time).

Truthfully, I’d never heard of Skidmore in my life until a high school guidance counselor recommended it to me in my senior year, saying that it would be a good match for me because of my extracurricular activities, headlined by being president of my school’s animal rights coalition (no, really—we called it a coalition).

Skidmore was one of a couple schools I was accepted to, but it was the only college at which I qualified for scholarships that would cover my full education, room and board, and then some (about a quarter million dollars’ worth)—so that was where I went. Having never worked so much as a part-time job at that point and having parents that had literally not put even a penny into any kind of college fund for me, four fully-paid years of education with money left over on the side sounded pretty dang alluring to me.

Enrolling at Skidmore came along with a requisite I feared and dreaded: a mandatory first year in the dorms with a roommate. Having zero siblings and never even being permitted to have or attend a sleepover (not that I would have wanted to anyway), I had no clue what sharing a single room living space with another human would be like.

I determined that the best way to prep my impending roommate for a school year in close proximity to me would be to compile and send him a list of topics that fell within my sphere of knowledge (things like The Simpsons, WWE and Days of our Lives). I believe the school gave us the E-Mails for our roommates as a means to try to break the proverbial “ice”, but I think all my efforts to provide safe subjects for discussion did was successfully freak my unlucky roommate out.

Wanting to have first crack at settling in and setting up my first dorm room before my roommate even arrived on campus, I signed up for a one-week volunteer program for incoming freshmen that would allow me to move in a week earlier than other students in my class.

Unfortunately, Skidmore had apparently seen that ploy before and had other ideas. My assigned roommate was also signed up to take part in the program, and managed to arrive even earlier than I.

My first-ever roommate, Nate W., was not exactly a match made in Heaven for me. Nate was a hardcore athlete, and he wanted no TV, lights or noise after 8PM most nights because he had to get up at like 5AM or 6AM or some other ungodly hour for something called “rowing practice” in order to increase his endurance.

Despite his being underage, Nate’s parents set up a mini fridge for him and stocked it up with beer it would be a violation of the rules for him to utilize. It was also an unexpected and scandalous experience for me waking up one morning and having there be a third person in our room: some random girl in Nate’s bed.

Clearly, this first cohabitation experience was not going to end well.

It didn’t. I returned after my first college Christmas break to find half our room—Nate’s half—cleared out and abandoned. Nate had requested a room change without telling me and had already moved on to his new home before I even knew that was a possibility. I never liked Nate and was always uncomfortable around him, but even I felt a little rejected having had my first roommate silently abandon me.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have tortured him by playing dozens of episodes of the soap opera Passions (wherein the main cast was being sucked into Hell during one night of their time that took place over months of real-time) while he was in the room, despite Nate’s vocal objections. Oh well. I guess his endurance wasn’t so great after all.