If you watched any movies about college before you came to Ursinus, you know that the main character somehow always finds their best friends on the first day of school and stays with them for the rest of their lives. Or, you’re like me and watched Sex and The City and wanted your own Carrie, Samatha, Miranda, and Charlotte. But for most of us in the real world, we don’t find this group and oftentimes, if we think we do, it doesn’t always last forever. But is it bad if we don’t find our friend group right away? Or, do we feel like we have to stay with the people we first meet freshman year?
I asked some of my friends in my sorority, Tau Sigma Gamma, and one of the girls said, “When people get to freshman year, they latch on to the first people they meet and close themselves off from meeting other people.” And this can be true: it’s easy to find these people immediately and want to hold on to them forever. But when it gets to the point of only staying with those people because of convenience, problems can start to grow.
It doesn’t help if you have the opportunities to grow but feel like you can’t branch out due to fear of losing those friends. Another friend of mine says this: “It can be hard from an outside perspective looking at social media and seeing how ‘put together’ these friend groups are; in reality, everyone wants to have more friends, and the solution I found was joining things on campus like jobs or extracurriculars.”
It may seem like all I do in my articles is complain about social media (and I intend
to do so for many more articles to come), but I think it plays on the downfall of how we perceive other people’s friendships. We may look at a friend group and think they have it all together, but we will never truly know how they operate.
Some may read this and think, “Ok, so what do you want me to do?” I know it’s soooo typical to say, but joining clubs on campus is the best way to meet new people! Freshmen, I know it might not seem like you’re going to have the time to join clubs, but they will be so worth it! I’ve personally met a lot of people through different clubs and organizations. While friends and friendships aren’t the only important thing in college, I think finding the people you can imagine being in your life for a while can be one of the most rewarding outcomes.