<p>Oh wow, I’d never thought to google my screen name. NONE of the dragonmom entries are me!!!
Although if I could do some of those Crouching Tiger moves I’d be excited…</p>
<p>oh my god when i used my firefox toolbar search, and i see the list of popular searches, my full name is on there.</p>
<p>i think “blairt” means something in russian, because that’s all i get when i google my screen name</p>
<p>When I google myself I get the ticket window for the San Francisco Giants.</p>
<p>“Just talked to a friend who googled her son’s roommate. She has been losing sleep over the pairing; S, who went to a diverse public HS, listed himself as “atheist,” and roommate is a home-schooled fundamentalist Christian. Her older son had almost as extreme a pairing a few years ago, with disastrous results. I think it’s better to know this ahead of time…” </p>
<p>That’s a shame. Judging an entire person – before even meeting them – on if they believe in god or not. Isn’t college for…education? For exploration, and trying new things and meeting people of diverse backgrounds and expanding your horizons, your views? Your prejudices?</p>
<p>What would you draw from a google anyway? Roommate is an atheist… Roommate received a parking ticket at age 17… Roommate has a private myspace page…</p>
<p>Upsetting/slightly depressing how these parents wish to protect their kids from everything (heavens! someone with different beliefs who will share a closet with my child! call the police, wake up the neighbors!)…really makes me weep for the future …when this generation takes over… my future co-workers better grow up by then (or, my future employees)… the horror. the bubble generation! that’s it…your worries take up too much space to navigate unchartered waters and explore a teeny bit.</p>
<p>I see no problem in it…just don’t tell someone that you googled them. Now <em>that</em> would be overly creepy!</p>
<p>I think its kind of creepy and nosy.</p>
<p>I “Googled” my roommates and found nothing. 
I guess they’re boring people! </p>
<p>-The Googling Coot66</p>
<p>Once again someone should point out that’s it not about the googling it’s about your relationship with your child.</p>
<p>I am definitely a googler. I google everything! We have a common last name, so when I google my son, I find a lawyer, judge, actor and a couple of others. When I add “math” in the search, I get my son, and a math professor.
My dd doesnt seem to share her name with as many people. Her hits are all from being in the national spelling bee.</p>
<p>I worry more that my kids will someday google me. I have been on the net for over 17 years, back of the days of usenet. Who knew that everything we posted would some day be there for all to see? I posted some pretty embarassing things. The only saving grace is I posted a lot. I dont think my kids have that much attention span :-)</p>
<p>My son is a senior. The school I suspect he will go to, doesnt assign roomies before hand. They have a weird tradition of placing kids after they get there. But, I would google, probably with my son reading over my shoulder. I can see how it would play out… “Hey, lets see what we can find about this kid?” and then we would both go to the computer. My son lacks curiosity, until someone points out there is something to be curious about. Funny kid.</p>
<p>Regarding the atheist paired with the fundie - we homeschool, but unlike many HSers, we are left wing atheists. Since we hang with other homeschoolers, over the years my kids have had a lot of friends who are pretty right wing fundies. My kids know not to talk about religion and politics with most of their homeschool friends. Without those subjects they have have lots of stuff in common.</p>
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<p>Do they employ a talking hat to make the decisions?</p>
<p>When D got her roommate assignment it took her all of about a minute to go Google her. She was a little dismayed to see all of her roommate’s many achievements, awards, and newspaper articles about her dating back to when she was 13 years old. Which made D feel a little inadequate by comparison. She said “Gosh, the only thing she’ll be able to see about me is that I was vice president of the high school marching band council. That and she’ll think I wrote all that bad poetry.”</p>
<p>D has a semi-unusual name, but there is another girl of the same name and roughly the same age who posts a lot of bad poetry on-line. D’s roommate had a very unusual name, so there was no question that it was all her.</p>
<p>Coureur asks “Do they employ a talking hat to make the decisions?”</p>
<p>That is the joke. The school is Caltech, which has a house system that is a cross between dorms and frat/sorortity. Everyone is assigned a house, and generally you stay affiliated with that house for the four years, and the rest of your life. When techers meet each other, they always ask “what house?”. </p>
<p>When students get to Caltech, they are assigned a room and roomie, and are told not to unpack. Off they go to the mountians for a few days, and when they come back they spend a certain amount of time in ‘rotation’ which is eating at the different houses, and going to activities. Then the kids list their 4 (of 8) choices. Then reps of the different houses get together and try and figure it out. At some point they set off the cannon, and that is the signal for the frosh to go figure out which house they are assigned. They go to their first choice, then second, etc… </p>
<p>I think the house my son will pick (if he gets accepted) has a lot of singles, and tend to give them to the frosh. that would be perfect.</p>
<p>I haven’t posted in a while, but I’ve been reading the boards.</p>
<p>I received an email this morning from somebody who has google alerts set for my name. (Not a relative or friend.) It definitely felt weird. The person actually forwarded me the alert. </p>
<p>I have googled my kids’ names in the past to find newspaper articles etc.</p>
<p>Just read the comment about being worried about rooming with an atheist. To me, that sort of reaction sums up the problem with googling a roommate instead of getting to know them on their own terms. College is a time to remake yourself, in some ways – you get a fresh start, with people who have no preconceptions about you, who don’t know you from high school or middle school or church or family gatherings. That a great thing, an amazing freedom that students have coming into college; they can work on being the person they aspire to being, without preconceptions from people around them. When you prime your student by saying, “Oh no, your new roommate is an atheist, is a bad poet, is a Republican, is a fundie…” Well, what you’re doing is saying, “Hey, rather than take this new person at face value for who they are when you meet them the first time and for who they are trying to become as a young adult, pay attention what they may have been in the past.”</p>
<p>Sure, a student may have been trouble in high school, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be trouble in college. Every person is unique, and we can always change and make our future story different. The A student overcheiving volunteer candy striper who started a “Silver Ring Thing” chapter may decide once she gets to college that she wants to be the “bad girl”. A student who “made it out” of an urban school and stopped hanging with a gang his junior year may be set on becoming a lawyer and may spend all his time studying and being active in student government. </p>
<p>So, to me, saying that you want to know everything possible about your roommate before you get there is like saying you secretly open birthday presents in advance, so you’ll know if you’re not going to like them when your birthday comes. And for all you know, your student may <em>be</em> the future bad roommate, once they finally get away from your micromanagement. :-)</p>
<p>TrinSF,
You said it so well. I tried…(#56).
I went to school OOS, which I’m sure most kids here do. I would have hated for someone to know everything about me before I went off to school.</p>
<p>Good post, TrinSF. I agree.</p>
<p>I do think it is different if, after conversations with your roommate or some degree of personal interaction, you find that you have irreconcilable differences that will almost certainly have a very negative effect on your year. This knowledge would probably be gained from sources such as google/myspace/facebook but also talking or communicating with the person directly. I think that with adults, most situations and differences–even vast ones–can be managed, but if a student finds that his supposed roommate won’t work to handle their differences, and their differences are vast ones, then I think the student can look into whether a different rooming assignment can be made before beginning the year. I’m saying this from the standpoint of a lesbian who, at a summer program, had to room with someone who made life very unnecessarily trying. I have close friends who are religious–in fact, most of my friends are Catholic–so this is not a religious bias. In my case, my roommate treated me poorly, spread rumors about me and my close friends, did not adjust behavior when our RA talked with us as a group and her individually, and was very apparently scared to be in the room alone with me. Though I dealt with the situation with (mostly) good humor, other people would certainly suffer psychologically from being in such a position. If a bad situation can be forseen and the other roommate is disrespectful and unwilling to discuss it and if this personal difference will have a direct, not inconsequential, negative effect on the student, then I think it’s acceptable for the student to look into alternative housing arrangements despite not meeting the roommate. These situations would of course be very rare.</p>
<p>corranged</p>
<p>So sorry you had this bad experience. Your posts are delightful and insightful and I have a lot of respect for you. I think it is fairly rare for a roommate situation to be intolerable, but it certainly happens.</p>
<p>And I agree about the re-making of self too. Though I googled my son’s roommate (and got no info), I would never have given my son any info I might have gotten unless it was horrific and I was sure I had the right person.</p>
<p>Thank you, Bethievt. Since this was a summer program, we were obviously much younger than college freshman. I do think that college is a big step up from high school, and I’ve found that there is an enormous difference in maturity between college freshman and high school seniors. Most college students should be able to fairly and rationally handle differences, but there are always those who insist on creating problems.</p>
<p>I would think that what you might read doesn’t adequately reflect on the student…the clubs, EC’s might of been for show and not their real interests and other things might give a wrong impression. My coworker jokes that her son had a “dream roommate” on paper, almost sounded “saint-like” but was nothing like that in person, turned out on the meaner side and non-compromising. And it would be hard to bring up anything you “googled” without admitting it and that would sound strange.
My son didn’t have the best experience, roommate-wise, but knows his roommate this year and it should be better. He said nothing on paper would of prepared him for all the personality quirks…some of that is just an experience you have to go through and learn from.</p>
<p>I’ve googled people, including myself, and out of curiosity checked on intelius to find out how many people might be listed under a certain name across the U.S. According to intelius people finder, with some of the typical, American-sounding names, you might find 200 or 400 listings for people who have that same name in the U.S.</p>