“Excuse me, do you know where the BU (Barry Kaye College of Business) building is?”
“Ha, freshman.” That’s the response I got after asking an upperclassman where the BU building was.
This past week, I’ve felt like a high school freshman all over again. It’s so funny because right before you get out of high school, you feel like the king of the world: you’re 18, you can drive, and you don’t have a curfew. Things seem great, right? Not after you start going to college and know absolutely no one. It’s not even like in high school, where you still knew most people from your eighth-grade class. Here, you actually know no one. At least that has been the case for me, considering most of my friends went to UCF or UF.
In high school, if you socialized with the people sitting next to you, you knew that you’d probably sit with them for the rest of the school year -- if not for the rest of your high school career. Here, even if you meet a good dozen people at a party, the next day they might not even say hi to you because they don’t recognize you from the previous night. You’d be lucky to get a high five if anything. That’s just how college is.
My whole life I’ve heard my parents say, “The College years are the best years of your life,” and “You’ll meet friends of a lifetime once you start college.” So, where are they? Where are those future classmates that I’m supposed to be friends with? Are they part of the newspaper? The student government? The radio? Or are they just regulars at Coyote Jack's?
At orientation, all the leaders kept saying that we had to get involved, that we had to make an effort to join clubs and organizations, go to social gatherings, etc. But, what if I actually don’t have time to do anything else? What if I have a job, take six classes and don’t live on campus? What am I supposed to do? Not have a social life for the rest of my college years?
There has got to be a way to meet people besides practically living on campus everyday. So, in my quest to try to find out how to make friends on campus, I decided to ask some of my friends in college how THEY made friends.
Many commuter students said that most of their friends were from high school and that they had met people in classes but hadn’t gotten to be friends with them yet. Students living on campus mentioned they had met other people in the elevators by simply saying hello, but like commuter students, most of their friends still came from high school. So, why are we holding on to our friends from high school and not socializing with new people in college? Why not say hello to the person sitting next to you?
My advice to all freshmen on campus is simply to be nice to as many people as possible, because the secret to having friends is looking approachable to others and smiling once in a while. Everybody seems to be preoccupied with work or school, but the next time you see somebody sitting alone at the food court, go up to them and start a conversation; you’d be surprised to see how many people you can meet that way.
But still, the best way to meet people is getting involved. I can honestly say that joining the University Press and getting involved in general have been the best things I could have ever done as a freshman. Not only has it made the transition from high school to college a bit easier, but I’ve met a lot of great people and haven’t felt as alone as I thought I would.
So, go out there, get involved in a club, join an organization, go to concerts or even start your own club if you want. Just make sure you talk to people. That’s the best advice I can give you. But if it helps, here’s a cool video…
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
This blog is fantastic.
I'm glad you took the "ha, freshman" quote in stride and didn't try to paint all of FAU as snobby or unhelpful (because it certainly isn't). I think that was very mature (and very professional) of you.
You were talking about how classes move together throughout high school and you said college is different. It is but it isn't: you'll actually see your "class" in your third and fourth years. Look around -- that guy was in History of Civ with you, that girl was in Biology, and so on. My advice is to talk to them.
I'm taking classes with the same 30-50 people that I've seen in two or three other classes. Since we all need to take these classes to graduate, and the classes are often prerequisites that lead into one another as a fairly well-defined sequence, you'll come to acknowledge others in your "class". You just have to get through your first two years where the class compositions are much more random because people are trying to get their core stuff out of the way.
Like you, when I came to FAU, I knew no one. My friends from high school went to Duke and Yale. As a commuter student, I had trouble meeting people at first too.
However, later on I found that talking about tests with other people was a great ice-breaker. Talking about tests led to inviting others to a study group. Study groups that ran long became group dinners as people made Moe's runs. Consistent study groups turned into friendships.
And then friendships turned into road trips to Busch Gardens, tailgating for FAU football, parties, and so on.
Now the 25 people I hang out with on a daily basis are all people I met at FAU (or friends of people that I met at FAU). When I graduate (which is next year), I can look back on all the people I met and the great times I had and say yeah, college really was the time of my life :)
Well thank your for the advice alan m. It was very helpful. :)
i absolutely LOVE this blog! it's the freshest take i've ever seen the UP do... to track a first-year student's entire experience is simply amazing and innovative.
i really think that this should be linked from the FAU main page, kind of like how dartmouth always has it's "freshman five" or whatever it's called. they basically pay a couple bucks a month to five freshman to blog on a regular basis about what it's like to be a freshman at dartmouth.
GREAT work, irene. i've bookmarked your blog and will be following your progress.
best of luck to you!
I've enjoyed reading your blog even as an upper classmen it makes me realize what its like you sort of forget once you know your way around that other don't. Thanks for the refresher
Post a Comment