Tip #1: Say yes before you have a reason to say no.
Look, freshman year is the first time your calendar doesn’t look like a game of Tetris and your excuses haven’t caught up yet. Someone on your floor asks if anyone wants boba? As long as it’s before 10 p.m., just say yes and head to one of the many spots flocked around campus. A club you're only kind of interested in is having a meeting with free pizza? Save the meal swipe and go. You don’t know these people well enough yet to know if you’ll click, but the best (and only) way to find out is to just show up.
By sophomore year or even freshman spring, everyone (plus you) has a routine, a friend group and some reasonable excuse for why they aren’t able to come hang out. Freshman fall is the one time saying yes is the easiest.
Tip #2: The friend of your friend is also your friend.
I feel like Captain Obvious writing this article so far, but I find myself forgetting this one all the time. On a campus of 5,000-something undergrads, you will find that everyone knows everyone. It's just your luck that the person in front of you in lecture is actually your roommate's teammate's ex's lab partner. This is a blessing and a curse, but as a freshman, it leans toward the former. If you see a familiar-ish face — maybe someone from your friend's hall or a person tagged in a mutual's story — go ahead and say hi. Ask to sit with them. Worst case, it's a little awkward for 30 seconds. Best case, you just skipped the "how can I even talk to this person" part because you already have something in common: you both know someone. Just please don’t sound like you’re trying to make connections for the sake of it; this isn’t LinkedIn.
Tip #3: Give a little, get a little lot!
When doing "research" for this article, I messaged my closest friends: "When did you guys ‘officially’ think of us as real friends?"
"when u would keep txting us to cometo ffc for dinner since there was mac and cheese"
"I would always look for you guys in lecture?"
"your liked reels kept popping up on my instagdam"
“i talk to my mom abt u gys all the time!!”
A lot of varying answers here, but something stands out immediately (other than the fact we all should use spellcheck more): repetition.
What makes a friendship isn’t brief hallway nods or one good conversation at the orientation event boring you to tears. What turns an acquaintance into a friendship are repeated, low-stakes interactions. It’s the FFC dinner text you send even though you’re not sure they’ll say yes. It’s saving the seat next to you in lecture. It’s a cute Pomeranian photo you send at 11 p.m. because your friend has her Pomeranian as her phone background. You’re putting effort into initiating each interaction until it stops feeling intentional and starts feeling effortless.
It's one thing to have a familiar face during orientation or that one person you always sit by in class. But unfortunately, any non-first-year student will tell you this: the friends you make the first couple of weeks aren't always your friends by winter break, and that's okay.
What separates the people who stick around from the people who fade into "we had a class together freshman year" is whether someone (which could be you!) keeps initiating. Be the one who texts first or who asks if they're free: I promise it stops feeling vulnerable a lot faster than you would think.
The keeping part
Finding friends at Hopkins is very much the easier half of this article.
Everyone's looking for that fabled college friend group in freshman fall, which means everyone's a little more open than they'll be later. Keeping them is the part nobody really prepares you for because it's less about grand moments and more about maintenance.
Schedules don’t magically line up, majors change and club enrollment happens. Maybe your friend decides on a major that eats their whole week, and you join a club that eats yours. Maybe breakfast gets harder to coordinate, especially when one friend has lab at 9 a.m., one friend has decided to swear off breakfast (something about cereal industry propaganda), and one friend wakes up bright and early at 12:30 p.m.
This is normal, and it doesn't mean the friendship is fading. But what it does mean is that it needs a little more intention than it did in September, when you both lived thirty feet apart and had nothing but time. So keep doing the small, repeatable things: the check-in text, the "I saw this and thought of you," the standing plan (even a boring one, like laundry at the same time every week) that doesn't require a whole conversation to schedule. And please be flexible and understanding! Plans may not knit together as organically as they did before, but that’s okay. At the end of the day, the strong friendships that make it past freshman year aren't the ones with the most dramatic origin story. Your best friends will probably be the ones who keep showing up.
Thansi Garikipati is a sophomore majoring in Biophysics from Edmond, Okla. She is the Public Editor for The News-Letter.
