I came to Southern last year as a transfer from Andrews. It was weird. After spending my junior year as a student missionary, I desperately craved something new. I needed a change of scenery, to get away from those blistery Michigan winters, and I decided Southern was the place I would establish my fresh start.
I arrived expecting to easily fit right in, make a million friends and be insanely happy. These predictions didn’t quite come true. I soon discovered that by junior year, everyone is fully cemented into their friend groups. Unfortunately, once those cliques have been created, there’s no obtaining access. How do you go about infiltrating a close-knit group of friends? It’s frustrating constantly being around people who all know each other. All those inside jokes being cracked and conversations about people you’ve never met. The memories you aren’t part of.
Freshmen were surprisingly the easiest demographic to integrate with. Everyone else just had those fixed friend groups already, and I was left to float around and figure out where I was supposed to fit in.
I’m an extrovert and consider myself to be a relatively friendly person. But no matter how friendly you are it’s exhausting to constantly be “on,” to be trying to make friends rather than just being with your friends. I got really tired of putting myself out there over and over again and then feeling like I’d only made a surface-level friend. I sort of came to the conclusion that I would just rather be by myself.
I know that I definitely could have tried harder socially last year. But I honestly wasn’t expecting to have to try at all. I’ve never been in a place where I had to work so hard to become friends with people.
Maybe it’s because I started at Andrews as a freshman, and making friends there was effortless. At all hours of the day I could go to the Student Center and find people sitting and talking with each other. Conversations in the Student Center ran deep too. I talked with people I had literally just met about everything from memes and relationships to politics and religion. And after that one conversation, we were friends. Just like that. It was a very simple and straightforward process. The best friends I made at Andrews were people I met by chance during a random conversation in the Student Center.
Despite a larger undergrad class size, Andrews felt a lot smaller, more connected, because people were less distant from each other. There are plenty of choices for fun here in Chattanooga from hiking up waterfalls to exploring cute coffee shops downtown. In snowy Berrien Springs however, there are far less excursion options and people are forced to just sit together on campus and connect.
I wish that here I had found that same sense of effortless community and connection that I experienced before.
Image credit: Anecia Ascalon