Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 19, 1995                   TAG: 9507190073
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-1   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                  LENGTH: Medium

MATCHMAKER, MATCHMAKER ... YOU'RE SO POKY

It's back to pencils and intuition for the freshman roommate matchers at Virginia Tech, after a new computerized matching system did what all new computer systems seem to do.

It didn't work right.

"It's going to take some tweaking and adjustments," said Pam Winfrey, director of Tech's housing operations.

When it does work, the computer does a pretty good job: nonsmokers are paired with nonsmokers and so on.

But the system's too slow - and the 4,800 freshmen going through orientation now will want to know who their roommates are within the month. Tech's residential department always mails assignments by the end of July. And as the summer's worn on, it's become increasingly clear that the computer's not spitting out a new match once every four minutes, as expected.

That means Tech's first-ever foray into computerized pairings will go the route that Radford's has taken. The machine will do some of the weeding through requests, but people will do the rest.

And that may not be all bad.

Tech's computer scans applications that list the basic requirements of roommate-dom: Smoker? Night owl? Music during study hour? Freshman or upperclassmen?

"The computer is very literal minded," said Karsten Davis, assistant director for services in Tech's housing office.

"When I was doing them manually, students would write little notes. Little nuances you could tell just from looking at the contract.

"The computer doesn't look for any little notes they might have written you personally," he said. "If they leave something out, the computer is not going to call [students] and say, 'What did you mean?'"

At least, not this year. While Tech made it through the upperclassmen matches this spring with the new system, the folks in the housing office who used to spend May to July scouring roommate applications will sharpen their pencils, and set to work to finish up the job in time. That is, "unless something happens we're not anticipating," Winfrey said.