As a senior, my fourth and final Welcome Week was bittersweet but lovely as always. Like many IU students, I spent parts of my first few days back in Bloomington catching up with friends.
Reflecting on my past Welcome Weeks at IU, I noticed an interesting trend. I’ve spent each new Welcome Week with a mostly different group of friends than from the previous year.
This made me wonder. Why is it that some college friendships are so strong, yet so short-lived?
Weren’t we told back in high school that the friendships we form in college are meant to last a lifetime?
The nature of college friendships seems to be a truly distinctive one, crafted around the infamous college experience.
For many freshmen, friends are often found around residence halls or campus housing.
In a way, I find the nature of dorm friendships to be somewhat similar to high school ones: convenience-based. This is not to say that they are in any way inauthentic or destined to fail.
However, in both situations, you are placed in close proximity to the same people for hours at a time, and often, you are bound to get along with some of them.
As a sophomore or junior, other factors come into play. I’ve noticed that people are often closest to their roommates. Sometimes, they try to maintain old friendships but find it becomes inconvenient with a busy college schedule.
As a senior, I have a few close friends left from freshmen year, but I have also formed an eclectic collection of pals through random housing assignments, classes and friends of friends.
Aside from these friendship changes associated with one’s progression through college, there is also another type of friendship shift: those due to people going in different directions.
In college, these fallout factors do tend to be thematic. Sometimes, roommate dramas cause rifts. Some people may begin to party more, some less. Other times, interests change, and friends change with them.
One thing is certain: whether or not you have kept the same friends close for the four years of college, come graduation, a new chapter begins.
College is a place where, hopefully, you can find people you really enjoy spending time with, and it is also a place where you have ample time to spend with those people.
How though, when graduation forces separation, do friendships continue?
I suppose in one short year I will discover how the process will work.
For now, I am sure of one thing. Scrolling through my social media feed like a good millennial, I often pass familiar faces and think, “It’s strange how much we used to hang out.”
Sometimes these past few years, I would even grow despondent when a friendship would end, feeling like somehow I had failed. My new opinion is of a different variety, though.
As cheesy as it sounds, college does teach about friendships. The important truth is that some friends may be temporary.
The great upside of the lesson, though, is that hopefully new friends will flow in. It’s great to have a handful of friends that never fade, but also great to have ones that you brushed your teeth next to in a dorm or lived with that one year in that tiny Bloomington house.
sdloughr@indiana.edu
