In this week’s RCL blog, I aim to step back from my day-to-day interactions and analyze the communities I have seen here at Penn State on a broader scale.
Month one has passed, and the abundance of friendship opportunities has slowed from an overwhelming stream of new faces, new friends, and new contacts in my phone to a slow trickle. Looking back on these few first weeks, I was able to observe several social trends in my quest to look deeper into the budding communities around campus.
Day 2 at Penn State I instantly noticed how the East quad looked like some version of a Pennsylvania statewide track meet. Groups of ten to fifteen kids, all from the same high school, flocked together in clusters, passive-aggressively eyeing up their competition. It is only natural to lean back on the people that you know and trust when navigating the tricky waters of the first week of college, but I couldn’t help but notice that this common trend seemed to cause a ripple effect of unintentional harm. As I observed the large groups of high schoolers go out at night and eat together in the dining hall, I also observed the kids who came from out of state looking in envy. I even found myself looking in envy as well.
I caught myself sitting in my lobby one day, doing my homework, and watching the large friend groups walk past on the sidewalks. Laughing, talking, skipping. I found myself creating a reality in my head that everyone at this school already knows each other, and already has their solidified group. I assumed that it’s probably time for me to just drop out, go to trade school, and move back in with my parents- abandoning the idea of ever finding college friends.
The nature of communities around the school was that of a ship wreck. Those who had people from their past to cling onto used them like a lifeboat, whilst the people coming to college in hopes of making all new friends felt as if they were struggling to stay afloat by themselves.
Luckily, this feeling began to fade by the second week as I detected a new era of friendships begin to form. The disintegration of the high school groups began to be apparent as the average size of friend groups spotted on campus dropped from 15 to 5. This is when I came to a second revolution about the communities here at PSU.
Each day it seemed as if I had been making an overwhelming number of friends, and I thought I’d never be able to process these quick and hasty interactions of girls I traded numbers with on the white loop, or in line at Canyon Pizza, and turn them into genuine friendships. I always was left wondering whether the people I talked to would end up being my future friend, or if they would just turn into another nameless face in the student section sea of blue and white. I searched for a way to make sense of the constant influx and automatic organization of people into categories such as “potential new best friend” or into “girl I’ll smile at in the hallway” 0r even, “someone I’ll have to reintroduce myself too.”
This is when I began to notice the fly trap nature of college friends.
The people that make an effort, initiate plans, and are not ashamed to be on the active search for friendships, seem to stick like flies to my trap. Meanwhile, the people who don’t remember my name, or don’t end up following through plans, often flake away and drift off into the abyss.
After the first two weeks, I am proud to say I have a pretty good collection of flies by my side.
No longer are the majority of people stuck on a lifeboat with the people they have known since high school, and no longer am I drowning by myself. I am carefully wading through the waters of forming connections and making friends, facing the trials and tribulations of freshman year, and focusing on keeping my head above water.