Campus Housing Roommate Matching System (CHARMS)
Campus Housing Roommate Matching System (CHARMS) is a roommate matching program for Freshmen, developed based on staff and student input that giving incoming Freshmen the option of selecting their own roommates would make for a more enjoyable first year at Georgetown. The CHARMS process protects the anonymity of students until a roommate pair has been formed, so you only see numbers, not names. You can see full profiles of students and exchange messages before deciding to live together.
If you have been accepted into a Living and Learning community, you should not participate in CHARMS.
If you do not have a roommate by the time that CHARMS ends, the Office of Residential Living will use your Living Preference Questionnaire to match you with another student to form a roommate pair based on your common living preferences.
Finding a Roommate
You can search for potential roommates in three ways.
1. By Net ID
Searching by NetID is for students who already know each other and have agreed to be roommates. Only a small number of students use this option. You MUST know the NetID of the other student. You can invite your friend to be your roommate, and she or he MUST accept the invitation for pair to be valid.
2. For Exact Match
The fastest way to search for a roommate is to search for an exact match. This will attempt to find a student in the database who has indicated the same preference for every category as you. Note that this is done without regard to the degree of importance assigned to the category for either you or the other student (e.g. if you said that you don’t smoke and it’s of great importance to you (rating=10), the exact matching process will match you with a student that doesn’t smoke, but for whom the category may only rate a 3).
We have found that there are very few times that an exact match will exist. If there is not a student who has recorded the same preference as you for every category, the page will then automatically try to identify a match for you based on key categories (smoking, neat, sharing and study environment and location). We have found that most students will find a match based on this process.
3. Using categories
Search using a category
You can search for students using any categories. Additionally, while the Search for Exact Match feature searches for students that match your preferences, searching by categories lets you search for a student whose answer to a question might not match your preference (e.g. a student who likes to study in a room might be best matched up with a student who studies in the library). We have found that the greater number of categories you search on, the fewer matches you find. So you may want to limit the number of categories you search on.
Search using all Categories
To search using all categories, just click on the checkbox next to All Categories and click on the Search button. For each of the categories you have specified, you can indicate a preference, and optionally a degree specified by the respondents.
For example, to search for students who prefer a quiet study environment, regardless of the priority that student puts on quietness while studying, select Quiet and leave the other columns blank:
If you want to find a student who insists on quiet while studying, use the left two columns to specify a degree, as shown below:
The above will locate students who answered Quiet and assigned it an importance of 8 or above.
Opt-Out
You can also opt-out of CHARMS. Choosing to remove yourself from the CHARMS process means that you will not have to select your own roommate. No other student will be able to select you from within CHARMS. Residential Services will match you with another student based on your responses to the Living Preference Questionnaire. We will match you as close as is possible with another student based on your shared preferences. The size of the pool from which the Office of Residential Living will match roommates will depend on how many students remove themselves from CHARMS or how many students have not found a match at the end of the CHARMS process. As such the degree of similarity between you and the student we match you with is hard to predict.