The Genuine Freshman: Where the Hell are my Friends?

Making meaningful friends your first semester can be an extremely difficult thing as a freshman. Finding your tribe or your niche of people that you can easily relate to is something that takes time, and I did not fully understand that during my first semester. During the first few of weeks of classes first semester, I missed my friends from high school and my life at home so much, and all the new friendships I was making felt so superficial. I had such a solid group of best friends in high school, and I felt utterly lost and confused why I didn’t have that immediately starting school. Looking back at myself now, I was being extremely irrational because the friendships I had in high school started at such a young age, and they had years to grow and evolve. Regardless, at the time, it was very difficult for me to accept, and I wondered what was wrong with me. The song “WHERE THE HELL ARE MY FRIENDS” by LANY became my go-to when I would have an angst-filled day.

The reality is that friendships will inevitably be superficial when you first start to meet people: it is important to accept that you are not going to have a cohesive group of friends right when you get to college. Just being patient and not putting pressure on yourself will bring you the greatest returns, and that fact was very hard for me to swallow. Like Bob Marley said and as quoted in the photo, “Don’t complicate your mind.” When I came back for my second semester, I already felt that my friendships had become stronger than they were before, and I felt the superficial barriers break. This was a social aspect of college that no one had prepared me for or told me to expect in high school, and as I mentioned in my previous post, the deceptiveness of social media made me think my friends from high school at different colleges had all found close friends immediately.

My advice to my fellow freshmen is to try new things, to join new clubs, and to put themselves out there as much as they can to fill that gap of not having a niche. Just put faith in the fact that we go to school with an undergraduate population of 19,000, so you are bound to find people you genuinely connect with soon. Like my orientation advisor wisely said, “You can’t make a small campus big, but you can make a big campus small.”

Vineet Chauhan is a freshman majoring in economics and English. His column, The Genuine Freshman, runs every week on Tuesday.