The First Year Friend Group Phenomenon

By Dylan Young on April 12, 2013

Photo Courtesy Flicker Creative Commons User rich701

The First Year Friend Group is a phenomenon that, through consultation with multiple friends from a range of schools, seems to be an across-the-board occurrence. The First Year Friend Group is that group of people you meet the first week of college. You all are displaced and vulnerable and, like a moth to the flame, looking for something to anchor you. If someone smiles and greets you kindly during those first few days, all you can think is “Oh-you-smiled-at-me-you-seem-so-nice-please-be-my-Best-Friend-I-don’t-know-you-but-I-don’t-care-let’s-be-BFFLs-and-we-can-smile-at-each-other-like-that-all-the-time-and-then-maybe-I-will-be-cool-and-college-will-be-perfect-because-I-found-my-Bestie-For-Life.”

This, my friends, is simply a stage of the postpartum frenzy of acclimating to college life. For most people, the First Year Friend Group is a set of acquaintances of convenience. In my first year, I lived in a mixed-classes dorm that was actually separated from the rest of campus by a small river. We had a dining hall in our building and it was such a trek from the classroom buildings that, once I got back from class (“over the river and through the woods!”), I really had no desire, most nights, to leave again. My roommate and I ended up joining a little group of about ten other first years from the top floors of our building and we developed a routine. Every night at approximately 5:30pm, we would scamper down the six flights of stairs and slap our OneCards down on one of the big round tables, claiming our seats. We’d stay until the dining hall staff kicked us out, gossiping and groaning, laughing and lollygagging, and avoiding our homework. It became almost a ritual and a grounding point in each day while we were all floating around wide-eyed the rest of the time in a vast sea of new experiences.

The First Year Friend Group is all about feeling a part of something, of claiming ownership over this strange new world, of creating a home away from the familiar rhythms of family life. In college, you make your family. In the beginning, you are trying to figure out your self-definitions and the First Year Friend Group is a sort of sounding board, off of which it is helpful to bounce ideas. Sometimes these relationships forged in First Year are solid and carry all the way through your four years together. Sometimes, as you continue to expand and reorganize and change your perspectives, these friendships fade and new friendships solidify and take their place. Either way, the First Year Friend Group is a safety net and an important function of the adjustment period between high school and college.

My friends and I are seniors now. We are graduating in May and are about to dive off into the World Outside Of School. It is another volatile adjustment period and our reactions to this prospect are mixed. But something interesting and circular has occurred that really rounds out and gives some good closure to these past four years: our First Year Friend Group has been getting dinner again.

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