Freshmen Worries: Find Your Niche

To all the freshmen just now moving in:

Moving into college is scary. I know that the number one worry is fitting in, and so here’s some advice that’s both comforting and a bit challenging.

College, like life, is about finding your niche: that one little place where you fit in snugly and where no one else could fill the void just as perfectly as you do. Some people fit in easily to the party culture, and are known to their specific group of friends as the most hilarious dancer in the history of the world. Others prefer not to drink, and find that the gaming club might be more to their taste. Either way, both students have found their niche.

Even cats have their place on campus. {Image by catsdo.com}

When you first come to college, finding your niche will be difficult. The motto “know thyself” is especially appropriate because, the more you know about yourself, the easier it will be to hone in on the one spot on campus where you’ll feel right at home. I, for example, didn’t know myself particularly well, and so I jumped around for about a month before I found the theater community, and now these people are my best friends.

I went to a lot of different activities that first month. First, there was ultimate frisbee, then there were a few different community service groups, then I tried making friends with the athletes in my hall, but I didn’t gel with any of them particularly well. The first friends I really made were a small group of people in special interest housing who all chose not to drink out of mere preference, and so, my first few weekends at college, instead of being taken to the hospital for alcohol poisoning, I sat around with my friends as we watched the flashing lights of ambulances from across the valley on north quad.

There was a reason I quit ultimate frisbee. {Image by failblog.org}

This is the danger of the first few weekends at many colleges, particularly mine: people are so eager to find a niche that they drink past their limits, and so, ironically, it’s often the people with the highest GPA’s and fewest friends that end up in the hospital.

If you’re a first-year who’s just now moving in to college, I just hope that this information might calm your nerves a bit, and let you know that, at just about every college, there’s a place for you. Don’t be in such a rush to find it.