USD Magazine, Fall 2000

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Love them, hate them, can 't live without them, freshman roommates are a USO rite of passage. By Susan Herold

l, is most likely how you were matched with your first college ommate. person you never met sat in a room with a stack of 3 x 5 index cards on which you had cleverly answered questions like, "What kind of music do you listen to?" and "Describe your spare-time activities," and "What are your academic interests?" and where you had judi– ciously circled your housekeeping habits: 1 being neat, 5 being messy. And then chis anonymous person, who has all the patience of Job and all the foresight of Nostradamus and all the intuition of your mother, read the answers on those cards, sighed a little sigh, and paper-clipped your card to another. And you were roommates. Amazingly, you discovered you actually liked each ocher and you didn't mind the wee towel on the floor and you really listened when she told you about che fight wich her boyfriend and one thing led to another and before you knew it you were the maid of honor at the

wedding and standing there crying and it suddenly hit you: This person, who at one time was a complete stranger, turned out to be your best friend in the world. "I remember thinking that whole

summer before I came to USD chat I was going to end up living wich some weird person, that she'd probably be a cheerleader and nothing like me," recalls Vickie Minardi '87, whose freshman roomie, Karen (Rivera) Wise '87 '89, was her best college friend, and remains so today. "I was nervous, but when

I saw Karen, we completely tarted hugging. It just was amazing," says Minardi,

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