When coming to college, you make friends on the first day. It's only natural since everybody has one thing in common: everyone is desperate to make friends. This causes most people to cling to the very first people they meet, but no matter how long it takes (days, weeks, months) you will lose many of them along your college experience. The connection of “no one knows each other so let’s be friends” will not be able to keep long lasting relationships. You start to learn about people, their interests and hobbies, and figure out that you are not as alike as you first thought. While you might connect with people on a surface level, you quickly learn how much you don't have in common on more important things, like political or religious views.

Most people think that when they come across this problem it’s not so bad. “Sure we have different views on the world, but I’m an adult and I can disagree without making a huge fuss.” This is one of the worst lies you can tell yourself. I, as a liberal democrat, told myself I could converse with a conservative republican. This is the total opposite of the spectrum, and we did soon find out that our views are completely opposite. We would have debated back and forth on what was right and wrong, places where to draw the line. It soon became too much as I learned that my friends' views borderline racism and homophobic tendencies. It's hard to be friends with someone who says “Gays should die, and all democrats should burn in hell.”

Though this case was an extreme, I am not saying you will not meet people like that as every campus has their fair share of believers to those ideals, you will also just lose friends to simple things such as schedules. I have lost most of my friends from first semester due to our times clashing and our majors not lining up. I have even lost friends in my own major as unlikely as that sounds. This is also not to say that you will lose all your friends. I have my college best friend, who I met on the first day, and our friendship is as strong as ever. Though the friend group that we both socialized with started with eight different people, it's now just the two of us.

This is not as bad as it sounds, though; it may seem that you have lost friends all around you, you find twice as many friends that you will actually spend your college experience with. I, myself, have found friends that I am sure I will keep for most of my life. We opened up on a whole new level and made life connections that have truly changed my life in such a short time.

Although I am not out of my freshman year and still have a long way to go, I know my friends that I have made now are in a better position to make it through to my senior year and hopefully even beyond then. I understand that I still have friendships that I am going to lose later on but I am happy to know that I am in a more understanding and caring group. I would not want to trade the friends I have obtained now for anything.