College Life

Finding Your People

The friendships you make in these years can last a lifetime — but only if you do the slightly terrifying thing and put yourself in the room.

6 min readPlanetEye Designs

The friendships you make in these years can last a lifetime — but only if you do the slightly terrifying thing and put yourself in the room.

Everyone is faking the confidence

The first few weeks of a new place have a particular loneliness to them: everyone seems to have already found their group, made their friends, figured it out — and you're the only one eating alone, quietly convinced you've been left behind. Here is the secret that would have saved you the dread: almost everyone feels exactly that, at exactly the same time. The confidence you're intimidated by is, for most people, a performance laid over the same uncertainty you feel.

Knowing that changes the math. The slightly awkward person you're nervous to talk to is very likely relieved you spoke first. The groups that look sealed and permanent are, three weeks in, not sealed at all — they're still forming, still porous, still hoping someone interesting shows up. The window is wide open. It just doesn't feel that way from the outside.

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

— William James

Colorful Treble Clef Music Collage Art — Shared enthusiasm is the fastest road to friendship.

Enthusiasm is the shortcut

The fastest way to find your people is not to look for friends directly — it is to chase something you genuinely care about and notice who's standing next to you. The band, the climbing wall, the student paper, the terrible intramural team, the club for the thing you love. Shared enthusiasm skips months of small talk. You bond faster over a guitar, a problem set or a cause than you ever will over forced mingling at an orientation mixer.

This is why the advice 'just join things' is better than it sounds. You're not joining to pad a résumé; you're walking into rooms pre-filtered for people who care about what you care about. Your people are usually found doing the thing you love, badly, in public — which means the price of admission is being willing to be a beginner in front of strangers. Pay it.

Depth takes repetition

Real friendship is built less by big moments than by repetition — the same faces, the same room, week after week, until familiarity quietly becomes trust. This is why proximity and routine matter so much in these years: the people you keep accidentally running into become, over a semester, the people who know you. You can't shortcut it, but you can set it up, by planting yourself reliably in a few places where the same good people gather.

And go deeper than the surface when you can. The friendships that last are the ones where, at some point, both people risked a little honesty — said the real thing, admitted the hard thing. Most people are waiting for someone else to go first. Be the one who occasionally does, and watch acquaintances turn into the family you choose.

Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.

— Helen Keller

Skateboard Street Art Collage Silhouette Urban Design — The people beside you doing the thing become the people who stay.

Put yourself in the room

Almost every good friendship you'll ever make required one slightly uncomfortable first move — a hello, a 'mind if I join?', a yes to an invitation you were tempted to decline. The discomfort is brief. The friendship can last fifty years. That is one of the best trades available to a human being, and the only thing standing in the way is the few seconds of nerve it takes to make it.

So put yourself in the room. Chase what you love and look around. Your people are out there, feeling exactly as unmoored as you are, hoping someone says hello first. Let it be you.

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