Building the Skills for Roommate Harmony | Student-led Rutgers program earns national recognition
Laughter, conversation, and candy hearts filled the room as Rutgers students gathered for Valentine-themed icebreakers: speed-meeting sessions, a connection wall, and Lego flower building.
What was in the air was not romance, but another type of connection that’s vitally important to the college experience: Learning how to become a good roommate. And how to remain friendly while resolving the conflicts that inevitably arise when students live together.
Knights of Connections is a student-created event, held each spring by student leaders in Rutgers–New Brunswick’s Residence Hall Association (RHA) and supported by the Division of Student Affairs’ Residence Life staff. Its low-stress activities are informed by hard-earned student wisdom, evidence-based conflict-resolution practices, and years’ worth of Student Affairs data on the causes of roommate tension.
Through activities like “Tidy Truth or Dare” (where the dares are to fold a towel, clean a plate, or make a tiny bed) and “Boundary Bingo,” Knights of Connections encourages students to reflect on their own living habits and expectations—and understand their potential to either mesh or clash with those of a living partner. Student facilitators also lead guided conversations on how to navigate disagreements constructively.
“The ability to communicate expectations and resolve issues in a low-stress way doesn’t come naturally to all students, especially if they’re new to college life and even more so after Covid,” said Gabriella Vasquez, the Department of Residence Life’s student leader coordinator and an avid supporter of Knights of Connections.
The program’s co-founders include Julianna Evans. In Spring 2023, when she was finishing her BA in English from the School of Arts and Sciences and serving as a member of RHA’s Executive Board, many students seemed to have lost basic social skills after the pandemic-driven year of remote learning.
“We were back on campus physically, but something was lost: a transmission of knowledge about how to make friends and socialize on campus,” said Evans, who graduated that spring and is now a Rutgers Law School student in Camden.
She said the post-Covid rupture contributed to tensions in the dorms, as many students lacked the skills to navigate disagreements about cleanliness, noise, visitors, and other roommate pressure points.
Now in its fourth year, Knights of Connections has had a modest impact; this spring it attracted 350 students over two nights at the Druskin Lounge and Livingston B Reading Room. But it recently earned national recognition as a valuable tool that can be scaled up here at Rutgers and at other universities.
The National Association of College & University Residence Boards and the Association of College & University Housing Officers–International named Knights of Connections the 2026 Daniel Siler Program of the Year for “exceptional impact, creativity, and dedication to enhancing the residential experience.” Rutgers organizers will present the program at the NACURH annual conference in May and an ACUHO-I webinar in fall 2026.
And here at Rutgers, the initiative will move to larger venues, the better to accommodate more students, in Spring 2027.
For Vasquez, the initiative’s greatest value is that it is fully student-driven. Students in the RHA oversee all logistics, event activities, and marketing, and make changes on the fly in response to participant feedback. Additional support comes from the residence hall governments, National Residence Hall Honorary, and student volunteers. Student organizers have found Knights of Connections to be the type of co-curricular, high-impact learning opportunity valued by Rutgers–New Brunswick’s Academic Master Plan.
“This is peer-to-peer learning at its best, with students building a stronger community for each other, and learning so much about leadership in the process,” Vasquez said.
