HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS IN A NEW SCHOOL
Caroline Haywood spent most of the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Southwestern University in Georgetown buzzing with excitement to begin her freshman year. But when she caught a peek of the campus last August, she tensed up.
“It was really scary,” said Haywood, 19, a Klein Forest High School graduate. “At first it didn’t hit me until I was driving, and I saw the school and I was like, ‘Oh my God. I actually have to talk to people and make friends. I don’t know how I’m going to do this.’ ”
But while it seemed overwhelming at the time, the self-proclaimed social butterfly now feels it wasn’t so hard after all.
“To be stressed out during any change is normal,” said Denise Cipolla, coordinator of guidance and counseling for Conroe ISD. “You’re much more comfortable when you’re in the known quantity.
“All of the unknowns that come with change — everybody goes through that. You have to recognize that it takes a little time to get adjusted.”
Thousands of area teens will be heading to new middle schools, high schools or colleges this month. Among their many challenges may be making friends and finding their place in a sea of strangers.
Haywood and others offer these nine tips to win friends this semester:
Get out of your head.
“It’s pretty typical when you start a new school to be anxious. There’s uncertainty, and you’re not yet sure where you’re going to fit in,” said Jamie Howard, director of the stress and resilience program at the Child Mind Institute in New York City. But it’s important not to let that uncertainty turn into a roadblock. “For typical kids who are worried about making new friends, we say you should be friendly and force yourself to say hello to people, and put yourself out there a little bit, even though there’s uncertainty involved,”
she said. Sound scary? It
shouldn’t. Howard suggested picturing a typical classroom, and estimating the likelihood of at least one friendly student in the class. The odds are in your favor.
2. Join up.
“I would say to incoming freshmen to find a club. That’s how you’re going to make the most friends,” said Rosy Murphy, a sophomore at Pearland High School, where her grade has about four times as many students as her eighth-grade class. It took Murphy until late October to find the student organization that felt like home to her — her school’s Gay Straight Alliance — but once she joined, she said she found her “tribe.”
Clubs are a great place to make genuine connections that don’t feel forced “because that’s where you’ll find people with the same interests,” she said.
3. Fake it till you make it.
“Confidence is very important,” said Julian Carter, a sophomore at Glenda Dawson High School in Pearland. That can be tough for teens who often find themselves lacking confidence during high school, he noted. But if you don’t have the self-assurance to strike up a conversation, you may lose an opportunity to forge a connection. So summon the courage in your depths, and if that’s depleted, just pretend it’s there.
“If you can’t go up to people and start making friends, you’ll be friendless,” Carter said. “So yeah, fake it till you make it. You have to at least try sometimes.”
4. Get over yourself.
“You just kind of have to get rid of your fears, honestly,” said Murphy, who knows that is easy advice to dish out but can be incredibly hard in practice.
“You have to get to the point where you don’t have a comfort zone. You have to get out there. You can’t care what they’re going to think of you,” she said. “I know you will, but you have to pretend like you don’t care.”
5. It’s OK to be selective.
“You can be a little choosier about who you spend your time with, and since we’re in high school, our personalities are more developed and we know ourselves better and we know the people to surround ourselves with,” Carter said.
“You can’t just surround yourself with a bunch of people. You see kids all the time on social media with 6,000 followers, and not even 1,000 people in their school, and it’s like, they don’t even know any of these people,” he said, noting he’s learned in recent years to value quality over quantity. “You have to know they’re going to be good for you and keep you grounded.”
6. Don’t compare yourself to others on social media.
“I know for a fact that I take pictures when I’m happiest and when I look the prettiest, and when my acne is at its kindest, and far away from my face — and the lighting has to be ideal,” Murphy said. “It can be hard to remember that other people are doing that, too.
When you spot someone doing something effortlessly, remember there’s likely plenty of effort involved — it’s just hidden. Howard, the psychologist, cautions teens not to let someone else’s socialmedia persona be a benchmark for their life.
“With social media, what can happen is people can curate these fantastic Instagram accounts and Facebook pages, that make it look like their life is nothing but pure happiness, and they look terrific in every photo,” Howard said. “But it’s not a realistic sense of what their
life is actually like.”
7. Be patient.
Haywood spent the first several weeks of college video-chatting with her friends from home on FaceTime and texting them a slew of “wish you were here” messages as the homesickness set in and she found herself without a large group of friends.
“It’s just kind of a slow process, but you just have to put your foot forward and keep going and not, like, freak out all the time because you don’t have too many friends,” said Haywood, who acknowledged that’s easier said than done. But a little faith can go a long way with this, she said.
“Even if you’re a super shy person, you’ll meet at least one person who thinks you’re awesome and will listen to you,” she said. “It’s impossible to go to school and not meet that person in your life. It will happen — even if it’s in the middle of the year.”
8. Don’t be afraid to be a protégé.
At Texas A&M’s annual Fish Camp, where thousands of first-year students spend a long weekend learning Aggie traditions before the beginning of the year, upperclassmen take freshmen under their wings. And it’s not just a weekend-long commitment. The groups meet for lunches, coffee dates and other outings throughout the year, said Chase Young, camp adviser and a former counselor who graduated with the class of 2008.
“It’s that pay-itforward mentality,” said Young. “It’s ‘I’ve been in your shoes, and here’s my story.’ Letting students know that it’s not weird what they’re going through, and if anything, it’s part of the normal process.”
Freshmen reaching out to their counselor shouldn’t feel like they’re bugging that cool, older student, he added. That’s what the program is there for, and counselors like to feel needed, too.
If you’re not part of a program with a built-in network like Fish Camp, Haywood recommends searching out friends on your dorm floor. She met her soon-to-be-roommate and best friend standing in the doorway of another friend’s dorm room while canvassing her neighbors to see who wanted to eat lunch with her in the dining hall one day.
9. Be yourself.
New beginnings are often seen as a chance to reinvent yourself. But pretending to be anything other than the truest version” of yourself isn’t going to attract friends who are truly compatible.
“You shouldn’t become a different person in college. I think you should just be the best version of yourself that you like, because you don’t have the pressure you used to have,” Haywood said.
“If you know you’re super funny, just go out there and be funny, even if your friends from high school didn’t appreciate it,” she continued. “Be yourself as hard as you can.”