“You’re freshmen! You have no real friends,” taunted an actress of The Compleat Works of William Shakespeare to a crowd of restless freshmen during New Student Week. Behind the uproarious laughter was a sad, pitiful and piercing truth that resonated with everyone in the room. And even though that happened weeks ago, it still rings true — we don’t have any real friends.
The “friends” we’ve had are more lifesaver buoys than anything, something to which we’ve desperately clung in order to stay afloat during the first few weeks. These friends were convenient, “what was your name again?” friends whose hand we’d awkwardly shaken as though we were at a business meeting. When we asked where they were from, we promptly forgot the location, and often even forgot their names, which didn’t help our situation.
So how do we find where our niche is? Who are “our people”? The best answer seems to be to recognize that everyone is in the same boat looking for a group of friends to call their own. Often these friendships are difficult to create and to maintain long-term; the trick is to find comfort in this unified goal, and not to rush the process.
Making friends is a talent they teach you in elementary school. We all remember the experience: Mom drops us off at the curb, our light-up tennies hit the pavement as we hop out of the back seat, and she shouts, “Bye, sweetheart, have a good day! Make new friends!” The first few days, we’re catching a few people’s eyes, smiling a little, but mostly looking at the floor. Not a pleasant experience by any measure. And even though we’re now significantly older and a few of us here and there are more mature, we’re still playing essentially the same game.
Many find their first friends merely by the convenience of proximity. Weinberg freshman Scott Winston, like many others, is finding his solid ground in Bobb. “A lot of it is geographic — I know a lot of people in Bobb and Elder,” he says. Rebecca TeKolste, a Communication freshman, agreed. “My residential college really is a community, and I will always be able to come down to Hinman to eat and find someone to sit with,” she says.
Some freshmen came in a step ahead of the rest, just back from a pre-orientation program such as Project Wildcat. P-Wild participant TeKolste says, “I came to Northwestern with a group of friends, and spending so much time together made us develop a pretty real relationship before we got here.” She maintains relationships with those friends and sees them about once a week.
But Winston doesn’t think these preliminary groups are permanent yet. “There’s so many new people that you don’t want to limit yourself and become cliquey. It’s too soon. But sometimes I don’t know when I meet people who are the ones I want to pursue. When is the point where I want to pursue this person versus letting them be just someone I happen to have met?”
Naturally, as time goes by, we start to wonder if our “now” friends will become our “permanent” friends. “Every day I’m learning something new about my friends. We’re past 50 percent through the getting-to-know-you process, and we’re learning about each other very quickly because we are with them twenty-four-seven,” said Winston. But Weinberg senior Rohini Srinivasan is very familiar with this process. “I am probably friends with only two or three people out of 20 that I was friends with in the first few weeks of freshman year,” he says. Clearly, not all of these first relationships are destined to last.
Throughout all of these experiences is a common thread: Everyone is in the same giant pool of water, searching for a friend to grab onto. Finding “our people” may seem an overwhelming task, as daunting as those first few days of kindergarten. It takes time, and as Winston advises, “Don’t be afraid that you haven’t found your group yet, because there are so many people to meet here that it would be a shame to limit yourself four weeks into school.” So if you ever feel like you can’t find anyone, don’t hurry up and settle. Remember that you are in an ocean full of people, and some of them are out there looking for you the same way you’re looking for them.