In the beginning of first semester, most people make friends by accident. You happen to sit next to someone during an orientation event, you start talking, and suddenly, you’re friends. They know another person that they think you might like so you meet up again, and you bring someone that you randomly picked up from your orientation group or a club meeting. You all start talking and seem to be getting along just fine, and you meet up with them again and again and again. Boom! You’ve created your friend group. Wow, who thought making friends in college would be so easy?
One of the things that I was most excited for in college was the lack of cliques. There wouldn’t be the rigid castes of jocks, nerds, popular girls, band geeks... everyone would be friends with everyone. To some degree, that held true: there were no stereotypical cliques. But, friend groups still formed almost immediately, and there seemed to be a sort of “lockdown period” in which, all of a sudden, no one was introducing themselves to each other anymore. You rarely heard the Holy Trinity of freshman questions anymore (“What’s your name?” “Where are you from?” “What’s your major?”), because everyone had settled into the groups that they had randomly formed during the first week.
Now it’s second semester. Classes have changed, people have added and dropped clubs, and there’s far more studying than in the blessed time of covered grades. My own friend group, one that was similarly Frankensteined together in the beginning of first semester, never gets together--I only ever see the people that had been closest to me. And the odd thing is, for the most part, I don’t miss the friend group that had been brought together so haphazardly. Even in just six months, I’m a completely different person than the one who first entered college, and some of the friends I made in the beginning--they’ve changed, too.
Whenever I’ve heard the wise upperclassmen give advice, they invariably say, “Sophomore year is better. You’ll find friends who you can stick with.” Right now is the transition period between our first college friends and our lifelong friends, especially as the rooming applications and lottery are right around the corner.
A lot of people that I always used to see together don’t hang out together anymore. A lot of my friends at other colleges also feel a sort of change in the social dynamic. It’s time for Orientation Week Part II, which will hopefully be somewhat less awkward than the first time around. This doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning all the friends that you’ve made, of course. It just means that we need to remember to keep talking to new people and try to make new friends instead of feeling fully content with just the friend groups from the beginning.
