How To Make Friends in College
When you’re in kindergarten, friendship is easy. You pick the person with the best crayons, and then you ask them if you can color with them. From there, lifelong friendships are formed. You’d be set for life, except for the fact that life is not like the movies, and your friends don’t all conveniently end up at the same college as you. (Others things that don’t happen in real life: everyone marrying their high school sweetheart- perfect makeup the moment you wake up- complete strangers handing you a flyer about a party at their place.) If you’re lucky, you’ll have a friend or two from back home. If you’re unlucky (like me), you’re in a brave new world all by yourself.
If you find yourself in this situation, you’ll probably also find yourself realizing that you have absolutely no idea how to make friends anymore. (There’s a serious lack of crayons in college.) All of my friendships formed organically. My friends sat next to me in class and ate at the same place for lunch. In college, if you’re in a 200-person class, there’s a good chance that you never sit next to the same person twice, and lunch time is anywhere from 10:30 to 4 depending on classes. Like I said, life isn’t a movie, so a hot, shirtless dude isn’t going to hit you gently with a Frisbee and then take you under his wing and show you the mysteries of college. No one is going to come up to you Barney Stinson-style and tell you that they’re going to teach you how to live. So, how do you make friends?
1) Be Brave.
There’s going to be a lull in some of your classes. This lull occurs when people have started showing up to class, but the teacher hasn’t started speaking yet. This is your moment. It may seem like there are miles between your desk and the desk of the student next to you, but it’s all in your head. Most people in a Freshman 101 class are going to be in the same position as you. So, if you see someone else shifting awkwardly and looking uncomfortable, make a joke or ask them what dorm they live in. People are pretty open to talking to strangers as long as you don’t look like you’re going to try to convert them to a new religion.
2) Join a Club
While you’ve talked to a few people in your class and maybe even sit next to each other regularly, there’s a difference between ‘my friend from Psych 101’ and ‘my friend.’ When I was first starting college, I had a lot of ‘friends from…,’ but not many actual friends. So I joined a club. There are a lot of clubs on college campuses. There’s an Acapella group, Pitch Perfect-style. There’s a sign language club. Baseball, Volleyball, Surfing. Altogether, there are 774 clubs. So you have options. I joined the FSU tennis club. Most of my best friends are members of the tennis club. When you’re part of a sports club, you travel to other college campuses around Florida. UF, FAU, FGCU, UNF. You make connections all over the state, and you bond with your teammates through a combination of long car rides and heat stroke. It also helps you fight off the Freshman 15 and get out from under the mountain of laundry that is no doubt suffocating you in your dorm room. People from the tennis club are some of my best friends on campus.
3) Events on Campus.
I know. It sounds lame. It’s like your mom organizing a high school party for you. But FSU puts on some great movies at the SLC. They bring musicians to the Club Downunder. The bowling alley on campus will put on events early in the semester, and no matter what you may think now that you’re a sophisticated high school graduate, you are never too cool for bowling. They’re school sponsored events, so it’s an easy walk for students who live on campus and don’t have access to cars. If it’s a big enough event, you’ll even run into people on the way there, and you shouldn’t be afraid to introduce yourself and have a conversation with a new person. That kid with the cool crayons in Kindergarten was a new person once.
So, college is new and weird, and there’s a decent chance that all you’ve eaten the past week are the groceries your parents bought you when they helped you move in and then ramen noodles once you’ve run out of those. No one taught you how to make friends, and you’re probably kind of jealous of the ease with which your Kindergarten-self did it. But the people around you are in the same boat. And you never know; maybe they’re just waiting for you to speak up first.