She could be your best friend. Or she could make your freshman year miserable.

This summer, incoming college freshmen will learn the name of the person with whom they will spend nine months living in a roughly 15-foot by 10-foot dorm room.

The experience is both exhilarating and frightening. Thoughts of independence — yes! — are followed shortly by questions about who this stranger is, and what sort of irksome idiosyncrasies do they possess?

The inexact science of matchmaking differs from school to school. At Edgewood College in Madison, residence life staff pore over questionnaires that tell them if a student likes to study with music blasting or in monkish silence, if they consider themselves an extrovert or an introvert, or if they’re messy or neat. One official even admitted that she looks for compatibility in handwriting, viewing students who write in all caps as potential kindred spirits.

But at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which houses almost 7,000 students every year, a student’s fate is left up to a computer program. The same is true for UW-Milwaukee, UW-Platteville, and UW-Whitewater.

Paul Evans, UW-Madison housing director, said he doesn’t think using a questionnaire will much improve the chances for a match made in heaven.

“It’s a lot of process and a lot of work that we’re not sure it gives you that big enough gain to make a difference,” Evans said.

Evans said he’s skeptical that a 17-year-old always knows his or her preferences and is concerned about setting up false expectations of finding a perfect match, he said.

“If you’re going away to a university, particularly a large public institution like Wisconsin, is it really the best that you end up finding someone who’s your clone as your roommate?” he asked.

But some students said they would feel reassured if their tastes were considered. Elizabeth May, an incoming freshman from Mosinee, said she would have liked to fill out a questionnaire, particularly to gauge whether her future roommate was a smoker. Although it isn’t allowed in the rooms, she is sensitive to the smoke that lingers on clothes.

“I would have loved a questionnaire,” she said. “My friends did that. They feel like they’re more secure.”

Katelyn Welsh, who will be a junior at UW-Madison, said she got along well with her freshman roommate when they first met in Witte Hall. But soon the roommate was partying all the time, never going to class, and refusing to leave the room or turn the lights off when Welsh wanted to sleep.

“She had no respect for me whatsoever,” said Welsh, who moved to a dorm on the other side of campus after the first semester.

Evans said that experience is relatively rare. He said he rates roommate satisfaction by the number of room change requests they get, and by that measure, he thinks UW-Madison is doing pretty well. In the 2008-2009 academic year, about 5.8 percent asked to change rooms.

Although UW-Madison students don’t fill out a survey, they can request to live with a particular person. This is common among athletes, who often choose to live together because of their unique demands and schedules, Evans said.

At Edgewood, where the freshman class of 300 is about the size of a large lecture at UW-Madison, officials value the personal touch of using a questionnaire.

“I think sometimes the transition to college is stressful enough, being away from home maybe for the first time ever,” said Cristie Jacobs, dean of students coordinator. “Hopefully your rooming situation is positive and that’s one stress you can eliminate.”

Jacobs looks for compatibility in a students’ preferences, but also takes cues from how a student fills out the form, whether they doodle, write large or small, and circle answers or mark them with an X.

She also recommends that students try living with a stranger, rather than someone they already know. If the year goes poorly, she warns, it could ruin a friendship.

Offering a personal matchmaking service may be easier at small schools. At Wisconsin Lutheran College in Milwaukee, residence life staff consult with admissions officials and coaches, who already know the roughly 200 incoming students from their applications and other contacts.

Judy Eggers, director of residence life, said some students are very particular on their housing forms. This year, several students emphasized that they wanted to live with someone with good personal hygiene and one student said she would only live with another vegetarian.

Social networking sites like Facebook are changing the way students investigate their future roommates.

Rather than reaching for the phone to make a call (are you bringing a microwave, or should I?), they judge one another  — fairly or not — by their online personas.

At UW-Madison, some students are even using Facebook to find their own perfect match, in lieu of a university-sanctioned questionnaire. Bailey Wagner, from Hawthorn Woods, Ill., said she filled out a survey on Facebook in a group for incoming UW-Madison freshman looking for roommates.

“We do our own,” she said. “I was looking for someone interested in doing intramural sports and staying fit.”

After contacting another future Badger online who also played tennis, Wagner met her for lunch and they hit it off. They’ll live in Elizabeth Waters next fall.