As a uni student, does it feel like your social life is struggling a little bit? Do you sometimes feel like your circle of friends are the same as those you had in high school?
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Uni is an entirely different experience to high school. It can be easy to feel like you’re a bit out your depth, especially since everything’s similar and yet so different to high school. It’s likely that you had the same circle of friends for a few years, and now being thrust into a cohort more than 10x bigger than you’re used to, how is your social life going to cope?
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Here are a few reasons why your social life at uni might be struggling a little bit:
You’re not involving yourself in any clubs or societies.
University is such a vastly different place to high school. In high school, you see the same people day in and day out for a few years. In uni, however, you could share a class with someone and then never see them again for the rest of your uni life.
Because uni classes, (and therefore your classmates) change so often, you don’t get much of an opportunity to develop friendships in class. Most likely there’s one classmate you talk to more than others, but once the semester’s over, everyone goes back to being strangers.
One of the easiest ways to make friends in uni is to join clubs or societies. With these, you get to meet other students who share the same passions and interests as you, giving you more of a chance to develop lifelong friendships. Most universities have clubs for almost every hobby out there.
There are specific clubs for each degree, each major, and even societies that cater to multiple faculties. If you want to find students with the same interests as you, there are clubs for specific sports, specific crafts, and even specific music tastes. I think I’ve even seen clubs out there dedicated to specific video games!
From personal experience, involving myself in clubs and societies has upped my communication skills by a whole level. I used to struggle a lot with my interview skills and just interactions with other people in general. But in the space of one year, I’ve found that I’m a lot more natural and at ease during interviews than I ever was before.
You don’t attend lectures.
I can’t speak from personal experience, but I’ve got friends who have definitely made some lifelong friends in the lecture theatre. Despite lectures being made up of hundreds of students, it is 100% possible to make new friends in those halls. You just have to be brave enough to strike up a conversation with the student sitting next to you :). High chances are that they’ll be doing the same or a similar degree to you.
You run off after class.
Anyone else guilty of zooming off after class? Counting down the minutes until the end of class and then running off to get home as soon as possible? Unless you really really enjoy the class you’re taking, or you have a bunch of friends in the same class, chances are that you can’t wait to get out as soon as you can.
Whether it’s because of boring professors, or your love for taking naps whenever you can, running off after class ends denies you the chance of hanging out with your classmates after class. Which then means losing potential friendships.
You don’t engage with your classmates.
Enrolling into a class completely alone is daunting, for sure. But, it really pushes you to put yourself out there and interact with your classmates. I know that it can be tempting to line up all of your classes with friends, but it may not be the best choice. Even though enrolling into classes with friends is great, it really limits opportunities to make new friends. Simply because it makes it too easy to limit your in-class interactions to only them.
If your goal is to make new friends and interact with a variety of new people, it might be a good idea to enrol into classes alone. Who knows, perhaps you’ll end the semester with a new best friend!
You’re afraid to make new friends.
After sharing classes with pretty much the same group of people throughout high school, it may seem daunting to put yourself out there and make new friends. Going from a smaller cohort to a much larger one where your classmates change every term/semester is definitely a bit of a steep curve.
I’ll be the first to admit that I was terrified of taking any class alone and would arrange to take the same classes as one or a few of my high school friends. It just placed a lot less pressure on me to put myself out there. After a while, I found myself way too attached to old friends and I definitely did not make any new friends through these efforts.
After a year, I realised that hanging onto my high school friends wasn’t helping me much at all. I felt lost when none of them were around and I lacked the communication skills essential for job interviews that I would’ve gained by interacting with a variety of new people. This was probably my biggest motivation for getting more involved with clubs and societies on campus.
So, if you’ve been feeling like your social life at uni is struggling a little bit, it might be time to try out some of these tips. If you have any other ideas, leave a comment down below!
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