Connections 101: Growing Your Network in College
A Comprehensive Guide to Building Deep Bonds With Your Peers
If you’re reading this article, you probably want to make some more friends in college. Maybe you want to meet someone who could give you a referral to your dream company. Maybe you’re struggling to find your home away from home. Maybe you’re looking for a study buddy in your harder classes. Or maybe you’re an incoming college freshman and you’re intimidated by the idea of entering a completely new environment with completely new people. Well, fear not. This guide has your back.
A little bit about us. We’re Bloom — a startup driven to improve the experiences of college students. We are building a personalized networking platform for college students to create meaningful, real-life connections with their peers. We spent 2019 interviewing more than 80 college students about their experiences on campus. We’re more than happy to share our insights with you.
Making friends in college is a lot easier than you might think! In this guide, we’ll break the process down into three parts: meeting people, creating friendships, and deepening bonds.
“The best time to make friends is before you need them.”
– Ethel Barrymore
Pro Tips
Before we get into the process, I want to share some tips for making good impressions and building strong connections.
- Seek to be interested rather than to be interesting. People are much more receptive to someone who cares about them. The strongest conversationalists are those who do this as second nature.
- Just be yourself, for real. When you meet someone, you don’t have to come across as the most perfect person in the world. Don’t pressure yourself to do so. You’re not going to vibe with everyone. The purpose of meeting people is to find that selection of people who you do vibe with.
- Leverage your current connections to make more. If you have friends already, odds are they also have other friends. If your friend knows someone that you want to meet, then asking your friend to introduce you is a great way to get acquainted!
- Go out and meet people, actually! All the advice in this guide is useless if you don’t put it to practice. Be brave and push your comfort zone!
Step I: Meeting People
The first step to forming a strong connection with someone is to meet them. In the following paragraphs, I’ll list a few places where it is common to meet new people. If I missed any, let me know in the comments below 🙂!
Campus Organizations/Clubs
I can confidently say that organizations are the number one most effective way to meet people on campus.
On campus you can usually find a club for every possible hobby, interest, and professional goal. And if it doesn’t exist already, you can make your own. Campus organizations are a great way to find friends and build strong bonds. Personally, I’ve found my best friends through my dance organizations — and I never danced before freshman year.
Being in the same organization as someone makes it ten times easier to break the ice. So smile and introduce yourself!
You can also ask them any of the following questions:
- “What was your motivation for joining this organization?”
- “What got you into [insert topic of the organization here]?”
- “What are you looking to get out of this organization?”
Some organizations are very social in nature. They may have a group culture, or organized system in place where you are paired up with a random member every other week to go grab coffee or lunch. Take advantage of these opportunities!
Remember, since it’s an organization, you’ll see the same people over and over again. So don’t worry if you don’t get a chance to meet them on the first day, there will be plenty more chances!
Campus Events
Campus events are also great places to meet people. Similar to organizations, you’ll already have a shared talking point by being at the same event as someone.
Some examples of campus events at my college include:
- Sports games
- Cultural events (Autumn Evening, Men of Substance Showcase, Asia Night, etc.)
- Date auctions
- Dance shows
- Fashion shows
- Concerts (Slope Day)
Try to go out to these events when you have time. Don’t stay in your dorm all day!
Dorm Halls
You’ll spend your entire school year living in your dorm hall. So there will be plenty of opportunities to meet your neighbors. You might not have as much in common as someone you meet at a campus event or organization. But, don’t let that stop you from introducing yourself and asking about their day!
Playing Sports
If you like to play basketball, go to the gym and play some pickup with some people. If you become a regular, you’ll start to see the same people over and over again. This will build familiarity and make it easier to build deeper connections with them in the long run.
Of course, this applies to all sports — not just basketball.
Dining Halls
When I was a freshman, I came into college not knowing anybody. So I pushed my comfort zone and sat across a random group of people every time I went to a dining hall. It was pretty nerve-wracking, but it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my college experience.
**Fun fact, this is how I met my girlfriend of 2 years. Sharing a meal is a low stakes way to meet new people. Breaking bread also breaks down barriers.
I learned a lot about different organizations and opportunities on campus from this. I did this for about a week until I made a decent number of acquaintances.
Class
Your classes are another good place to meet people. Don’t be afraid to ask your neighbor for help if you’re confused. Just make sure you keep the noise to a minimum so that you don’t disrupt people around you.
Some classes are structured to encourage discussion. In these classes, take advantage of those times and meet some of your classmates!
Technology
It’s 2020, there’s an abundance of resources online that you can use to grow your network and make friends! Learn how to write cold emails and get comfortable with sending that DM on a social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, GroupMe, LinkedIn, etc.).
Also, be on the lookout for the launch of our platform, Bloom (it might solve all your collegiate social struggles 😉).
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
— Dale Carnegie
Step II: Creating Friendships
Congratulations, you broke the ice and now you’ve made some acquaintances! Now it’s time to take those acquaintances and turn them into friends.
The key element in building friendships is quality time. So it’s important that you both establish a way to see each other regularly. Invite them to do things with you! In the beginning stages, the frequency of contact will determine how close of friends you become.
In my experience, I’ll see my closest friends five to seven days a week. But, I have other friends that I’ll see once or twice a month. However, I recommend not to go overboard when building new friendships. If you just met someone, it’s not normal to suddenly start meeting with them every day of the week. I know you’re excited, but take it slow 🙂.
Here are a few activities you can do with your acquaintances to establish regular contact:
- Eat
- Study
- Go to the gym
- Play sports
- Watch tv / play video games / play board games
- Hang out with mutual friends
- Go out (parties, campus events, pregames)
- Work on a passion project
- Sit together in class
- Go to club meetings together
Some of these activities make it normal to see each other more frequently. For example, if you‘re working on a passion project together, it’s probably necessary to see each other more than once a week.
The important part is that you keep in touch regularly. You’ll start to grow apart the longer that you go without seeing each other.
**Note: If you aren’t getting along well with your new acquaintance, don’t feel obligated to keep in touch with them. Make room in your schedule for people that you really vibe with!
“Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.”
– Oscar Wilde
Step III: Deepening Bonds
At this point you probably have a decent amount of friends — and you’re likely meeting more people through those friendships. But there’s a problem. You still don’t feel like you’ve found your home away from home. How do we take our current friendships and deepen them? The key is vulnerability.
It’s simple, but it sure isn’t easy. You’ll have to drop your defense and allow yourself to truly be seen, flaws and all.
Here’s a video from The School of Life that explains this concept very well.
To visualize how this whole process plays out, I’ll present a real life example of Afsaneh’s experience making a true friend.
Example — Afsaneh and Kyle
Afsaneh and Kyle are both members of a dance organization on campus known as BreakFree. This is how they met, built a friendship, and deepened that bond.
In Afsaneh’s words:
When Kyle tried out for BreakFree, I was totally uninvolved with the organization. That was the first semester for the dance organization that I created, so I decided not to take part in the BreakFree auditions. But my friend Xin Wen (also on BreakFree) was attending BreakFree auditions. She told me that there was this little boy (Kyle) that all the girls were obsessing over.
Then we met, something about Kyle made me feel like we connected so I literally said, “Hi nice to meet you I’m a sophomore on BreakFree and we’re married now.” It was one of those friendships where you find someone and y’all instantly click.
But at the time we weren’t actually super close, all of my friendships sophomore and freshman year were “shallow.” By that I mean we were in the same organization and enjoyed being together in that space but we didn’t really interact outside of that, besides saying “hi” on campus.
My defining moment of a deeper bond between us was BreakFree auditions in spring 2018. That was the first time I really disagreed with the team in a fundamental level. Kyle was one of the people who agreed with me, supported me in reassuring myself I wasn’t crazy (since, opinion-wise, I was in the minority), and he was there for me when I was really upset.
After that, Kyle and I were like “Forget it, we’re making auditions next semester because this was terrible and we need to take matters into our own hands.” At first it seemed like a heat of the moment type of decision so I wasn’t sure if he meant it. But in the summer, he reached out to me to see if I was still interested in collaborating with him. That was the beginning of the formulation of our deeper friendship.
That was our first project together and that’s when I realized how fun it was to work with Kyle. Since then we’ve worked on multiple passion projects together. We’ve shared personal stories about each other that we would never share with anyone else. We’ve had our ups and down but we’ve only grown closer.
“Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm & constant.”
– Socrates
Now that you have the toolkit for making friends in college. Go out and apply it! The more you practice, the more natural it will become. You’ll thank me later, or now 😉.
