Let me start off by saying that I'm not your typical college student. And by that, I mean that I'm not what you'd typically think of as a college student. When you think of college life, you probably picture a social scene: groups of students all hanging out together on campus, everyone in a group having a good time, and everyone knows each other--the ideal college lifestyle. But how accurate is this? Does everyone truly know each other, and are all of the students really as happy as they seem? Or is this just a portrayal of college often used in movies, TV, and social media for glorification purposes?

At the risk of sounding cliché, college isn't what most people think it to be. You've probably heard a lot of college prep coaches at your high school tell you something like, "No one makes friends during the first week, and a lot of students don't make friends during the first semester." And it's true. You've also heard first-hand stories from people about how hard it was for them to make friends at first in college. At this point in time, I intend to share my experiences as they occur in the present time, and compare them to the common misperceptions we all get from sites like Facebook and Instagram.

The first point I would like to make is that you may know a lot of people from shared classes or from group chats, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're in a friend group. This is especially true if you don't have a lot of classes in common with other students, or if you're not active on social media. Sure, you take classes with these people at least once or twice a week, and you may "Like" each other's posts, but how often do you hang out with these people, in person or outside of class? For me, it is absolutely difficult to get to know most of the people I share classes with because I end up with different sets of students in every class (which may be partly because of my unpopular choice of a computer science major), and sometimes that happens. Not everyone takes classes with the same group of people all the time, and lack of shared classes is more common than you might think.

Another thing I would like to point out is that you might find yourself shifting around groups of friends during the first few weeks of college (or, in my case, the entire first semester). Even if you end up hanging out with a group of people for a few days, you might eventually find that they just aren't the type of people you want to hang out with. You might have different interests, there might be personality conflicts, and worst case, there could be major differences in political views (which, luckily for me, were always either non-existent, minor, or successfully avoided during conversation). Because of this, I have often shifted between hang out groups during the semester. But the truth is, no one stays within a single, closed group of friends all the time, and it takes much more than a month or two to get to know the people around you.

I would like to make one final point (and I can't stress this enough): during the college semester, no one even has time to hang out with each other! There's so much work we all have to do for our classes that it eats into our social lives constantly. Never mind that there's a movie screening on the campus or that there's a music performance in the auditorium, I don't want to fail my English class! (I haven't actually taken an English class in college, so I'm really referring to other classes.) The truth is, we're under a lot of pressure in college to make sure that we can pass our courses with even a fairly decent grade. So we end up having to set times in our schedules for studying (yes, people do that) and when we're not doing work, we're catching up on sleep (people also do that). With all this pressure, there's almost no time to meet other people!

So I guess the overall point I'm trying to make is, you shouldn't worry if you're not living the college lifestyle you read about on people's timelines. No one really knows each other in the beginning, and they won't know each other that well for a while. So ignore what you see on Facebook, forget what you saw on Instagram, and don't stress out about missing opportunities! The important thing is to focus on your own goals, and hey, instead of trying to make 50 friends in 5 weeks, you will do just fine (maybe even better!) by making 5 friends over the course of 50 weeks. And remember not to treat it like a competition, and just find people you like and get to know them over time. Trust me, it'll definitely cause you less stress and make the experience more worthwhile.