The end of a break at home with family and old friends naturally signifies the start of a new tenure at school, a new semester filled with new opportunities. For many college freshmen, the return back to school can conjure either a feeling of discomfort or an anticipatory excitement of getting back into the jam-packed schedule that the school year yields. To any of those students who feel as though coming back to school is less of a homecoming and more of something that arouses stress and anxiousness, I am here to tell you that you are not alone, and a new semester will likely leave you with an attachment to your school and life on campus you never believed you could have.
I am naturally an optimist by disposition, so it is not in my character to jump to thinking the worst of a situation. I am not one to complain easily and am extremely stoic of any issues I am having. I won’t admit I am sick until it’s inevitable that I need to go to the doctor, I won’t ask for help with my work unless I cannot make progress after countless attempts on my own, and I will certainly not admit that I am not my happiest at college after only attending for a semester. I would always rather hang on to the potential that things can get better, and my optimism generally leads me to think that they will. Does this sometimes translate into naivety? Perhaps.
So, I felt out of character when I felt last year entering second semester of my freshman year that I had not solidified my place at school. My optimism about eventually feeling really and truly comfortable at Michigan had shrunk since I first stepped onto campus eager at the possibilities of what lay in store for me, and doubt was increasingly clouding the back of my mind. It was not that I hadn’t found people I liked to surround myself with at school, but I was missing the fundamental connections and deep friendships I was so accustomed to from home.
I believe that in a day and age in which mutual connections and friends of friends can so easily connect or hear of each other through social media and word of mouth, in which people jump so quickly to prove that they have become friends and saying “I love you” to a friend you may have just recently met is more expected than natural, there is an expectation for that level of deep connection immediately and seamlessly. This is not how human connection works. It is built on days, weeks, years of memories, good times, new experiences, all of which can and will happen for everyone. It does not happen overnight.
Those people I liked to hang out with first semester of my freshmen year, who I thought had potential to be my friends, have since become the people I cannot imagine my life without. Only a year of memories does not seem like enough to characterize the level of importance these people have in my life. Even more of these new invaluable people I had not yet encountered until my second semester last year. And even more I have likely not met yet.
It can be hard to keep a sense of optimism in a large, daunting place in which there are so many people, but you can feel very isolated. But with a new semester comes new opportunities, new classes, new organizations to join, new people to run into and meet in the dining hall, at a coffee shop, during a night out. It is up to you to take those opportunities for what they are worth and lay the foundations for those connections you will eventually be unable to live without. And from there you will be in my shoes a year from now wondering why you were ever worried in the first place.
Image courtesy of the huffingtonpost.com