My College Roommate

This is a true story...

Being a Tech student has its share of hardships... especially if you're a guy. In addition to the insane academic workload, the cramped dorms, and the occasional samurai sword attack, there's the dreaded Ratio. You see, Georgia Tech boasts one of the most unbalanced male-to-female ratio of students in the country, with over 2 guys for every girl. Throw in the fact that many of these girls are engineers who prefer to spend time in the lab rather than in front of the mirror and the pickings are slim. Yes, even Jimmy Dean thinks there's too much sausage on the Georgia Tech campus.

Now I'm not saying there aren't pretty girls at Tech. There are. It's just that with the Ratio and the focus on academics, there are less pretty girls than say at your typical SEC party school. So the odds are bad enough as it is, with guys clamoring for girls' attention and fighting over the one dumb blonde who somehow slipped through the cracks in the admission office... you can't afford any extra obstacles. But I had one. Boy, did I have one.

Enter Paulo Rodriguez.

The man pictured atop this post is Paulo, my roommate my sophomore year at Tech. If you think he looks like a model, it's because he is. With the odds of getting girls already against me, I also had to deal with this. The thing about beautiful people, though, is that they have flaws like the rest of us. All I had to do was find and expose Paulo's flaws, then surely all the ladies would look straight past his washboard abs and at me and my... personality. So I made a list of common beautiful people flaws and tested them out:

He may be hot, but he's dumb.
Nope. Paulo majored in Mechanical Engineering, is multi-lingual, and was on the Dean's List at one of the nation's top institutions.

He may be hot, but he's not nice.
Paulo was a sweetheart. He was always nice to me and by all accounts completely satisfied every single girl he brought back to the dorm.

He may be hot, but he's not smooth.
He was. And even if he wasn't, he's from South Africa and has a heavy accent. Not fair.

Paulo on Manhunt. (4th from the left)

So needless to say, I didn't get a lot of action thrown my way sophomore year... though I did always have the hottest girls on campus in my dorm. There were some other positives that came from having Paulo as a roommate. The lack of girls led to an increase in studying, so I got pretty good grades that year. I also learned an awful lot about humility.

Sophomore year ended and Paulo and I parted ways. We haven't kept in touch, but I have seen him on TV several times, most notably on the Bravo show Manhunt: The Search For America's Most Gorgeous Male Model. He got sixth. I feel sorry for the roommates of the five guys who finished ahead of him.