wow i'm actually pretty surprised about this! depending where I go, I will either have a med school classmate or another friend as a roommate... but I can't imagine living alone! how boring and lonely!
This totally depends on the kind of person you are.
I live alone and if it weren't for the fact that I'd like to get married someday, I would absolutely never go back to having a roommate. Some benefits (mostly compared to living with another med student, since that's the most common occurrence):
1) no one to judge what I wear/eat/watch on tv/listen to. No one who'll have loud sex in the middle of the night or people over at times I dont want company.
2) when I leave school, I'm done talking shop. Home for me is a separate entity from school. Living with a med student would just prolong the shop talk- we really don't have anything else to talk about once we've covered our past, cause nothing else is really going on in the present.
3) no inherent competition. I don't have to go home and watch my roommate study until 2 am while I watch tv and eat popcorn at 6 cause my brain feels like it's going to explode. One of the big pieces of advice you'll likely hear from your upperclassmen is never to compare yourself to your classmates. When you're studying, they're studying. When you're not studying, a bunch of them are still studying. If you're privy to that 24/7, it could be really anxiety-provoking and hard to ignore.
4) no drama whatsoever. No one is making a mess but me, no one is clogging my shower drain with their hair, blah blah. Med school is stressful enough without adding a stranger. If it's another med student, too, drama is doubly stressful because of how much med school is like middle school. I know two girls in my class who are purportedly "great friends" and who live together and who talk behind each other's backs all the time about how much they hate living together. But of course, they can't tell each other directly because then they'd lose not only a friend, but then their entire group of 10 girls who hang out together every weekend would be messed up, and their study group would be messed up, etc. So everyone goes on with the pretense. Pretty unnecessary drama, if you ask me.
5) if you're gonna have a random hookup with someone at your school (this happens more often than you think), having another school person around may be a really, really bad idea.
6) I'm rarely lonely. Granted, I'm the kind of girl who really likes her alone time, and I almost always study at school. This helps me cause I'm around people almost all day, and am only at home when I'm over socializing.
7) There are often areas near the hospital where a ton of med students live, or big residential buildings like that. I know that there are 2 3rd years and a fourth year living in my building, 10ish classmates live across the street or less than a block away, and a ton of other people in a 3 block radius. I run into them when I walk to school all the time, and if I'm ever locked out of my apartment or need a ride home from a bar or something, I always have somewhere to go, a couch to sleep on, or someone to share a cab with.
