Despite my slight panic at being a senior next year, entering the Draw this spring made me bask in a newfound sense of complacency over having found my rhythm at Stanford. I was finally drawing tier one; I finally knew the lay of the land on campus, and my days of confused shuffling in and out of freshman draw groups seemed but a distant memory. But in truth, every year at Stanford brings its own new situation that presses us to keep meeting new people and new challenges regardless of how settled we feel.

When I entered the Draw, I already knew where on campus I wanted to live, or at least I had moved in and out of enough places to have faith that, whatever housing arrangement I got, I could handle. Check. But when I mentally scrolled through all the people whom I might want to draw with, one by one, the objections popped up. Graduating. Staffing. Pre-assigning. Going abroad. Already drawing with someone else. Or otherwise, simply incompatible.

Maybe I’m just particular about roommates. But the more logistical obstacles aside, I realized that I am now able to draw a helpful distinction between friends and cohabitants. Living with someone on a day-in, day-out basis can be different from being best friends with that person — and, while I love my friends dearly, I would never want to live with some of them. It’s not that we wouldn’t get along. It’s that, in a roommate or drawmate, I’ve come to value something different, something that is friendship but in a slightly looser sense, that is pleasant and supportive but lacks the emotional interdependence of our closest relationships.

For many of us, college is the first time in our lives where we have the opportunity to live with our friends and arrange our living situations however we wish. Because of this exploration of newfound territory, college is also a time that allows us to learn which qualities we are able to tolerate in other people and which ones make us tick. I know that I came to Stanford with different expectations of compatibility than I have now. I did not make a distinction between cohabitation and deep emotional ties, so I half-expected that my college roommates and I would not just get along but would in fact be inseparable.

Now, however, I know better. That is to say, I have recognized the detriments of too much time spent together and have realized the value that personal space can add to a friendship. It seems that my ideal roommate is someone with whom I can amicably share the space, while still feeling the room is independent. This, quite possibly, could be a personal preference. It isn’t what everyone looks for. I know some people at Stanford for whom their roommate <I>is<P> literally their best friend. For them, the room becomes the common space associated with all of their shared experiences, conversations and inside jokes that encompass an entire year. I admire these sorts of relationships, but they’re hard to come by.

Coexistence, on the other hand, strikes me as something that we’re continually challenged to practice at Stanford. As undergraduates, we have the unique situation of living on campus for all four years, coming into contact with a variety of personalities. Regardless of who we draw with, we will end up meeting new people. We will be pressed to learn how to coexist. Of course, we coexist better with some people than we do with others — fundamentally, with those people whose habits are most similar to ours. Sheer similarity, however, does not a bosom buddy make, and due to the number of people we meet, we will count very few of our cohabitants as close friends.

What then divides deep friendship from coexistence? This seems difficult to pin down, and the answer is probably something ineffable. I recall many freshman dorm friends with whom I cohabited very well but with whom, for whatever reason, I never kept in touch with after freshman year. Now I recognize this progression as a moving through stages of life, as a time of discovering more about the relationships and possibilities that the world holds. That knowledge, if nothing else, will serve us well in later life, as we constantly go about interacting with new people and forming new alliances.

The flexibility and willingness to form new relationships, to whatever extent they blossom, is the side of the Draw that we less frequently consider. We can control our housing selections and draw groups to some extent, but beyond that, we will be faced with a placement and a situation — and then we will adjust, cope and learn from it. This challenge by no means ends with freshman year. If it does, it means that something within us has stagnated. And that’s something none of us want, not even when Stanford may start to seem “old hat.”

Rachel’s looking for some new hats. If you want to join her last minute draw group, send her an email before 5 p.m. today at [email protected].