This is the story of two strangers chosen to live in a 14-ft. by 14-ft. room and share each other's eccentricities (as well as a minifridge). What happens when they stop being polite and start getting real?

That's more or less the question posed on every episode of MTV's The Real World. But it's also what grips the mind of new college students as they experience the thrill of living intimately in a small cinder-block room with a complete stranger. Fun? Not if you've been living in a room of your own for the past 18 years — not even if you've been sharing space with a sibling.

If you were to tune in to these students reminiscing in later years about the roommates the housing gods randomly assigned them, you might expect to hear about a lot of loud music, erased phone messages and crusty hotpots. What you often get is much, much more bizarre. Stuff like:

"In the middle of the night, my roommate used to scream out in Spanish," Joel Husenits (Denison University, '95) says with distaste. "Spanish was not his native language."

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"My first roommate wore a ton of black and pierced her own nose," says Karen LiWanPo, 21, a student at University of Illinois at Chicago. "She thought she could sense the presence of ghosts. I was so afraid of her I didn't sleep a full night for an entire month."

Some ex-roommates put the "strange" in "stranger." Check out these stories:

"My roommate slept naked except for a brown-wool cap."

"My roommate let loose a boa constrictor in our room."

"My roommate wore my underwear."

There are success stories, of course. Pete Levine (University of Wisconsin, '00) knew nothing about his freshman-year roommate until the day they met. Four years later, they're like brothers. "We're so tight, we know everything about each other," says Levine. "We look back now and think how strange it was that two people who are so similar just happened to end up together."

Rachael Smith (University of Pennsylvania, '95) was nervous about leaving her longtime friends to go to school in Philadelphia, but as soon as she met her roommate Melissa, she knew she had met a soulmate. "We shared clothes, helped each other study, met for dinner every night and always went out together," says Smith. "I was never homesick." This summer Melissa was a bridesmaid in Smith's wedding, exactly nine years to the week after they first met.

Such stories are little consolation if you're assigned to live with, say, an argumentative person with questionable hygiene whose idol is former Real World-er Puck, the guy the other cast members had to kick out of the house. Sure, today's traumas are tomorrow's wildly entertaining stories, but it's quite a different matter when you're living that trauma in the here and now.

Before you go running for off-campus housing, take some tips from folks who have seen it all. You can often work things out if you go about it the right way. Al Calarco, associate director of housing and residential education at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (U.N.C.), has these comforting words of wisdom: "This first roommate can give you real-life skills at handling any relationship," he says. "It's all about negotiation."

You can dodge most roomie issues completely, according to Calarco, by sitting down during your first week together and asking each other three simple questions:

1. Are you a morning person or a night owl?

2. Are you neat or not so neat?

3. Can I borrow your stuff?

Then do your best to respect each other and come to some simple compromises. If she hits the sheets at 9 p.m., invest in earphones for your stereo. If he's a slob, agree that he'll confine his science experiments to his half of the room. If she's a tyrant about her clothes, don't wear them. Don't even look at them covetously.

Students at U.N.C., upon arrival, are actually required to complete a roommate agreement form, which sets guidelines for issues such as study time, phone usage and even opposite-sex visitors. Thirty days later, they must re-evaluate the contract and, if necessary, renegotiate. It seems to work. Fewer than 5% of students request a room change due to irreconcilable differences.

Even if you're the president of Young Republicans and your roommate is the school's resident nude performance artist, respecting each other's needs and coming to a compromise can go a long way toward preventing crying jags, or worse. Communication — and not only the Post-it note variety — is key, emphasizes Debbie Spillane, a conflict-mediation specialist at Texas A&M's Student Conflict Resolution Services. "You need to actively listen to each other," she says. "Identify any specific problems, and come up with solutions. And don't get on the defensive."

When it comes to setting ground rules — and enforcing them — sooner is better than later. The first six weeks together are crucial for your own college career as well as your roommate relationship, says Tom Kane, director of residence services at the University of South Florida in Tampa, who studied roommate compatibility for his dissertation at Texas Tech University. Have a good experience, and you'll probably stay put; a bad experience, and you're more likely to transfer to another school. Some roommates, it seems, are so awful that moving to another dorm room isn't enough; you want to put miles between you.

A recent graduate of Northwestern University says her situation caused her to question her choice of schools. "I avoided my roommate and my dorm entirely, and it made my social experience the first year miserable," she recalls. She says her roommate wrongly accused her of going through her things and threatened to press charges. "If my roommate had been cool, I probably wouldn't have had such negativity toward Northwestern." She looked into transferring to another school but finally ended up remaining where she was. (Understandably, she moved to a single, where she has stayed put.)

Not all roommate situations are so nonnegotiable, and initial friction doesn't always spell doom. Even if you're unlikely to end up marching arm in arm in the alumni parade at your 25th reunion, you may still enjoy cohabiting. When Sara Woods (Penn State University, '96) switched dorms in mid-semester and found herself assigned to live with a woman who had gone through seven roommates in two months, she was scared silly. "She never showered, she stayed up all night playing Dungeons & Dragons, she called herself 'Chainsaw' and she kept a collection of knives on her desk," remembers Woods. "But she turned out to be polite, respectful and a great conversationalist. She was one of the best roommates I ever had."

Living with someone you don't hang out with all the time can be easier than having your best friend as a roommate. In fact, differences in style (she wears combat boots, you prefer Mary Janes) and personality (he lives at his keyboard, you're the reigning keg-stand champ) often don't mean much in the grand scheme of dormitory bliss. If it did, many schools — even the tiniest of them — wouldn't base roommate selection on little more than smoking habits.

This year Indiana's Butler University scrapped the Myers-Briggs personality test it had been issuing to incoming freshmen as a tool for roommate selection. The reason? "We didn't find any significant improvement over the pairings we've done without it," says Lavester Johnson, vice president for student affairs. So the university went back to a basic one-page form that asks only three personal questions: Do you like to study with music on or off? Are you a morning or evening person? Do you smoke?

What happens if your situation is truly beyond bleak? Most likely, your school will bend over backward to make things better. It wants to keep you happy — because it wants to keep you. Resident advisers (or R.A.s), who live on dorm floors and work closely with students, are the first line of defense. And many schools have established mediation centers, where you can work out differences free with trained professionals.

If war breaks out, you'll certainly be given alternative housing options. Most differences are negotiable, but as Puck's former roommates learned, there's only so long you can put up with someone who picks at his wounds and eats peanut-butter-and-scab sandwiches.

Source: TIME/The Princeton Review's The Best College For You 2001