How to Make Friends in College
Starting at a new school can be a bit scary, especially if you are either far away from home or just don’t know anyone in your classes. Either way, you are thrown into an environment that you’re not comfortable with and can feel alone. However, it is easy to make friends in college as long as you are yourself, engage in clubs, form study groups, and don’t be afraid to ask for phone numbers!
1. Be True to Yourself In order to fundamentally make friends you must be yourself, whatever characteristics are apart of you like your love for dogs and sushi, shouldn’t change just because you want to be friends with the person who hates sushi and prefers snakes over dogs. While you two can be acquaintances, you should never change who you are to impress someone or form to their idea of a good friend.
2. Engage in Clubs If you find time to join a club between school and work, you should! You will meet like-minded individuals that will be able to, bare minimum, connect with you on something that you like. You can use clubs as an opportunity to also put yourself in more social situations. If you’re in a club, schools often do fair nights where multiple clubs are at a gymnasium or some sort of open space and there can be an event where everyone is talking, mingling, and getting to know one another. You will also be able to make friends based off the friends that you made in the club! They will introduce you to their respective friend groups and then your friend list will just grow from there.
3. Form Study Groups If you can’t find time between going to work, and going to school, all while maintaining good grades, then incorporate school work into the friend making process! For a majority of your classes you will need to take extra time out of your day to study and during that time you can add people to form a study group. You can do this numerous ways whether you want to base it off the people you’re sitting around, whether you are assigned a group for a project, or you just want to choose random people who you think are smart! You can create the group this way and form bonds all while maintaining your academic goals. Once school is over, you still have those connections with people so you can take the study group out of the classroom and turn it into a normal friend group!
4. Don’t be Afraid to Ask for Phone Numbers If you are generally shy or just don’t know how to approach making friends, then you can use school as a reason to get phone numbers. You can ask classmates for their number just in case you want to have help on notes, make sure you know the homework, or just have a point of contact for any questions in regards to the class. Once you are able to get phone numbers then you can go from there and gradually become friends with the person that will be helping you with school.
Making friends can not only be challenging, but it can just push you far out of your comfort zone. In cases like this, you need to make sure you maintain confidence, be yourself, and push yourself outside of your normal boundaries so that you can make friendships that can potentially last a very long time!