Current friends, future roommates

Taylor D'AndreaEditor-in-Chief Most seniors see graduation as a time to leave Samo behind, but six seniors will be bringing Samo right along with them as they venture into the unknown: higher education. Cody O’Connell and Christian Tomita, Aleya Spielman and Brenda Matos and David Shabsovich and Tai LeGagnoux are among Samo’s future college roommates, each at a different University of California (UC), and they are all excited by the prospect of taking on college with a little help from their friends.Best friends Spielman and Matos will be rooming together at University of California, Davis (UCD) next year, and even though they initially had reservations about rooming together they both decided it would be the ideal situation.“We were initially hesitant about rooming together because we wanted to meet new people,” Spielman said. “But I didn’t want to be paired with some psychopathic weirdo."Although Matos and Spielman will be rooming together, they didn’t want to eliminate the opportunity to meet new friends that often comes from rooming with someone new.“Hopefully we are going to room together, but in a suite, which means that it would be the two of us in a room that’s connected to rooms with other people,” Spielman said. “So we’d still be rooming with other people, just bunking together.”Spielman also says that she is confident in their ability to remain friends even while being in such close quarters.“Brenda’s really mellow, so she balances me out,” Spielman said. “I wouldn’t have roomed with someone from Samo that I’m not close friends with.”Samo seniors O’Connell and Tomita will also be rooming together next fall at at a UC a little closer to home — the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). O’Connell says that the idea of him rooming with someone familiar has calmed his parents’ nerves.“[UCSB] has a reputation for being a party school so I chose to room with someone [from Samo] so my parents felt better,” O’Connell said. “We can also play music together and have fun.”O’Connell is not nervous about meeting friends; on the contrary, he says that rooming with someone he knows may help him meet an even wider range of people next year.“Christian is still going to meet a lot of new people and I'm going to meet a lot of people, and then we can … exchange friends,” O’Connell said.O’Connell also said it is better to know he’s going to have a roommate he likes than to take a gamble in the random undergraduate pool, which is very large at any UC.“You don't know who you're going to get stuck with,” O’Connell said.Shabsovich, who will be rooming with LeGagnoux at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) next year, agrees, and says that he wanted to make sure he was compatible with his roommate.“You don't have a certain type of person going to UCLA," Shabsovich said, "so in a big school it’s good to know who you'll end up with.”So, for these friends, knowing who you'll end up with has offered a certain sense of confidence. All of these roommates say that they are excited by the prospect of spending next year with their good friends, and they can't wait to see where their new journeys lead them.tdandrea@thesamohi.com