By Thomas Infante
Arts & Entertainment Editor
Life at the College can feel all-consuming at times. The average college student’s busy life can make it easy to fall into a pattern. Showing up to classes, doing all the work for them and being involved in meaningful extracurricular activities — in my case, this newspaper — is no easy feat no matter what your major is.
Once you’ve settled into a productive routine, it feels like you’re eating, sleeping and breathing the College. As this goes on for semesters into years, it gets easier to lose touch with the things that exist outside of our campus bubble.
For many of us, one of the first things to go are old friendships. This is not usually an intended outcome — it’s simply a side effect of growing up. Most of one’s friends are determined by geographic similarities, as you’re all forced to go to school together.
I’m a little more than an hour away from my northern New Jersey hometown, but most of my old friends went much further. Social media makes it easier to keep in touch, but interactions rarely go below surface level. With such great distances in between, it’s all too easy to give up almost entirely on keeping in touch. It’s not that you don’t like each other anymore, but rather it’s no longer convenient to be close.
This is something that affects every young adult in America. Even if one doesn’t go to college at all, there will inevitably be many people that move away and won’t come back for a long time — if ever. That being said, what I have learned is that your relationships don’t necessarily die, but, instead, go into stasis.
Reactivating these friendships is worth a lot more than nostalgia. As much as I like the College, it’s far from being the most well-rounded college experience. My best friends from my hometown all go to different schools than I do and talking to them gives me new perspectives on college life. Every school is different, and some are vastly different from ours.
In many ways, staying in touch with your old friends can be a valuable learning experience. Everyone gets bored of their surroundings after a while, and the best remedy I’ve found is to visit another school for a weekend to crash with a friend.
College tours are way more fun when your tour guide is your best friend and you’re completely unsupervised. If nothing else, it gives everybody an excuse to have fun and make the most out of everything a particular school has to offer.
It’s especially easy nowadays to communicate across long distances. While I don’t have particularly long conversations on a regular basis with my friends outside the College, taking the extra few seconds to send a Snapchat or a text message goes a surprisingly long way in helping you feel connected. Sometimes I feel bad about how long I go without talking to certain people, but it’s important to remember that they’re just as preoccupied with responsibilities as I am.
Life is busy for everyone after graduating high school. It’s a time when you’re desperately trying to move up in the world either through higher education or employment. No matter what your goal or destination is, it’s always easier to achieve it with some support and advice from the people who have had your back before you even knew what the College was.
Featured image via Envato/Flickr
