It's Monday and I have a test every single day this week.



My roommate is struggling with the fact that she isn't making friends, down here.

I know the feeling. Not from this semester, but from the first college I attended (and then left in October).

It's really rough. Like...it's quite definitely from a lack of trying, if one is "unable" to make friends at college. Especially here. There are so many different types of people, and a lot of them are really great, well-educated students with whom I really do like to go out to eat, talk, et cetera!

High school messes it all up; students come into college unable to remember the last time they had to make friends, much less HOW they made those friends. So it's easy to forget that high school was heavy on group work and there was more time to talk--whereas, with college, you go in a classroom, usually, and you take notes for an hour.

So how do people make friends? Sports. Clubs. You don't go milling about in the cafeteria, you don't hope someone instantly likes you by the way you lift weights at the gym. You go places where people have to collaborate, just like you did in high school.

Only, in high school, it was called class.

So I guess my point, in all this, is that I know I didn't try hard enough at my first college. I know I was bad at making friends, and I know I ran away way too soon.

--But, to my defense, it was never where I wanted to be. Someone whose opinion I very much respected told me, the summer before freshman year, to chase it if I wanted to transfer to my current school (he was also there, and he knew it was a really fun place to get a degree).

That was literally all I needed--one person to say, Hey, go for it.

It was the one checkered flag among all the stop signs. He would hate to know that what he said was so important. And, to that credit, I would assume that I would have chosen my path, anyway, just at a different pace.

I hope my roommate finds her place in college life. Everyone needs that.

but i lift weights so sexxxy
» middaymoon on 2011-10-10 07:36:56

We didn't do that much group work in my high school, actually. My group of friends just carried over from middle school. X|

I think the process is a little easier if you're dorming, though, because then you just see the same people all the time and they tend to stick around.

Or well, the way I made friends at St. John's was just going up to random people who didn't look unfriendly and chatting them up. I hope your roommate finds something that works for her, though.
» randomjunk on 2011-10-11 09:40:07

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