Navigating college in the digital age: seniors feel pressure to impress next year’s potential roommates with heightened social media presence

Freshman year of college is hard, especially the first semester. The first few months spent away from home, surrounded by strangers,  overwhelmed with difficult classwork and feeling constant social pressures, are frightening and strange. To curb this fear of the unknown, many current high school seniors find solace in something that college students 20 years ago certainly didn’t have: social media. 

Almost every college across the country has a Facebook page for incoming freshmen to post about themselves and chat with future classmates in hopes of finding a roommate or friends for next year. With this connection, though, comes an added pressure to have an “appealing” social media presence to impress potential roommates and friends. In a survey of seniors at York, of the 76% who indicated they would be using social media to find a roommate, 75% rated their stress levels about the process of finding a roommate at a three or above out of five.

“Most of the social media posts are appearance-based and people follow you or ‘hit you up’ based on your appearance,” senior Emma Lutz said. 

While it might seem far-fetched to assume people shallowly judge others based solely on their pictures, some respondents of the survey admitted to doing this themselves. 

“I feel like everyone has the same description,” one anonymous female senior said. “I am subconsciously just judging them based on their photos and I don’t like that.” 

On the average college Facebook page, students share a few photos of themselves along with a caption describing their interests, potential major, living preference, etc. Group members can “like” or comment on these posts. Teenagers have expressed stress about the number of likes and comments on their regular social media posts, let alone those on college pages, where hundreds of random potential classmates and friends will view them. 

“The most attractive people with the coolest pictures showing they have a lot of friends always get a high number of likes,” senior Colleen Garcia said. “That leads to me comparing my post to others and wondering if I’m going to get as many likes as them and if anyone is going to want to room or be friends with me. It’s definitely stress-inducing and puts you under a lot of pressure, especially because we want to start off our freshman year of college the right way.”

Others are able to put this pressure out of their minds and have faith that they will connect with the right people. Some are choosing the random roommate selection method to completely avoid unnecessary stress. 

“I do not feel like I have to maintain a certain image on social media because if people do not want to be friends with who I am, then I don’t want to be friends with them,” senior Steve Chornij said, who plans to room with a random student. “When [my] parents went to college, they did not try to find friends before, they just showed up on campus and had the best time. That’s what I am going for.”

Among all the pressures first-year college students undergo, social media presence doesn’t have to be one of them. Many students are preaching one central idea: be yourself. 

“At first I felt as if I did have to maintain a certain image to impress people,” senior Abby Moriarty said. “After thinking about it, I realized that I’d rather room with someone who genuinely likes me and gets along with me rather than a fake facade that isn’t truly me. I just felt more comfortable knowing that my roommate knows what they’re in for and does know my quirks and the weird sides to me because she’ll be getting that from me every day next year so she might as well know what she signed up for.”