Branching Out

Here and I have heard in most other places, the university makes quite an effort at the beginning of the first term to make students comfortable with being here and to connect them as quickly as possible with others so that it becomes easy to develop a range of new acquaintances and new friends and unify under some banner or other. I chose to do sports which served the same purpose.

For many people, the friendships made in these first few days and weeks form the basis for their social life for the entire time they are at the university. Sports team, subject group, residence floor, society or club, fraternity or sorority, it really doesn't matter. All serve the essential purpose of kickstarting your social life and making you comfortable in this new stage of your life.

The first year of school, you are often missing home and your friends; I even had thoughts of transferring in those first few weeks. Joining a team made me feel better. I also participated in other things that were specifically designed to bring us first years together. But later I opted to branch out from what I now perceived as a kind of cage. I deliberately moved to a different floor, got involved in different activities and went to different parties.

One advantage of branching out is that everywhere you go on campus, you meet people who you know. But the most important thing for me has been that even though I feel I have a lot of connections on campus and many different friends that I hang out with, I have met a fairly small number of people with whom I have been able to make a much deeper and more complete connection. These are friends who are truly congruent with me, not that we agree on all topics.

The people who were on my team and on my original floor still seem to cling together. Next year they will share a house together, they still go on trips together, they party together. Together together together. But they are not branching out.

So strongly did I feel about this that I started a group. The purpose is to look at the mixes on campus, the cliques that have formed; we try to push people beyond their social boundaries. Because when you get down to it, we all share pretty much common interests by just coming to this school in the first place.

A friend of mine found the same thing. He played basketball in his freshman year and found that his entire life revolved around his basketball and the people he played basketball with. He joined the team to get to know people and to bond with them and it did serve that purpose. But it also limited the kinds of people he spent time with and what he did. He went so far as to quit basketball after his freshman year so that he could branch out to get away from that team and that limiting mindset.

The question you have to ask is: are you hanging out with these people because circumstances have placed you together or because they are truly the types of people who you would really want to become friends with.