After listening to her friends recount horror stories about their college roommates, incoming freshman Alyssa Handschuch was relieved to meet someone she wanted to live with via the group for accepted students at the University of Michigan on Facebook.

“This year one of my friends is stuck with someone she had no desire to room with,” she said. “I didn’t want to be put in that situation.”

With the increased prevalence of Facebook and other social networking sites, incoming freshmen now have the choice to look for roommates online, instead of leaving their housing decisions in the hands of the University.

University Housing is currently in the process of testing a social networking tool to help students find roommates without resorting to sites like Facebook or uroomsurf.com — a site that matches incoming students based on certain criteria.

About a year and a half ago, University Housing officials started to create a new website to provide students more choices in selecting their roommates. The pilot program was offered for the first time this year to incoming Mary Markley Hall residents.

Currently, University Housing offers incoming freshmen the option of being matched with a random roommate or requesting a roommate, possibly with the aid of uroomsurf.com or other roommate finding sites.

While developing the new program, officials consulted LSA Student Government and the Residence Halls Association.

LSA-SG junior representative Adam London worked on the project last year and said LSA-SG's role in the project provided input from a student perspective.

“It was certainly a collaborative process,” he said. “University administrators at all levels were very willing to meet with LSA-SG to discuss nuances of the plan.”

The resulting University pilot program acts as a self-contained networking site, allowing users to send and receive messages and to create personal profiles based on their responses to a survey.

However, unlike other online social networking tools, the University process still maintains some degree of “blindness.” Students are given anonymous identification numbers instead of being labeled by name. They can choose to give out personal information only after messaging anonymously with another user.

University Housing spokesman Peter Logan said this system allows students to portray themselves free from social pressure, in a way that other sites don’t allow them to do.

“Facebook pages are not always the best judge of a real personality,” Logan said.

By eliminating all external factors like photos and other media, the process allows students first to find people they are compatible to live with and then to learn everything else about them.

In addition to the anonymity, the University Housing option avoids excessive hobby and interest questions, like music preferences, instead focusing on “background-neutral questions” like study and room organization habits.

Michael Zabriskie, director of the Housing Information Office, said the office likes to focus the questions on rooming habits to prevent students from seeking roommates exactly like themselves.

“We value the differences that are present within our student population,” he said. “And we hope students will take advantage of those opportunities too.”

Logan said the questions are constructed to be extremely open-ended, forcing students to be as genuine as possible.

“The key thing is framing questions so that you don’t predispose students to answer in a certain way,” he said.