How to make friends at uni?

[90+FTW]

How I plan on making friends

[slothpomba]

^ tottttaaaaallly agreed with kp, uni can be lonely at first because you don't see the same people every day. Some days you walk in and you see everyone you've made friends with. Some days you walk in and there's no one you know. But if you can train yourself to take initiative during o-week, you will have a few people to linger around, and when you're already with a person or two, it's always easy to pick up more people who are standing by themselves. Most people will be happy to be adopted into a little friendship posse for the day! During the first few weeks at least....

Yeah definitely, it's less constant than high-school. I think the important thing to try think about is your own perceptions and expectations as well. In highschool i hung around with a large group of people constantly. Going to uni was a bit of a shock because for awhile i'd assumed it'd be like that and i'd have an entourage of people around me like that. Same with the expectation you'll always be around people, might be true for some if you really try at it but it usually isn't always true. For the first few weeks i felt like a bit of a loner but i realised it was my perception of what things should be like that was wrong. Sometimes you might have to eat lunch (shock horror!) and little things like that.

Definitely the perception that people will come up to you or you don't need to do much to get friends needs to go as well. As i said above, i had a shitty first few weeks but then i realised i was doing pretty much nothing to try meet new people and just kind of expected them to come to me.

you'll find that a lot of people don't have friends in uni but  they have friends outside of uni anyway.. stick with your high school friends in case high school friends tend to be for life whereas uni friends are momentary.

Yeah, i'm definitely much better friends with my highschool friends and even some people from AN than i am with the majority (or maybe all) of my Uni friends. A lot of them have only been acquaintances or i've only talked to them while we were in the same classes. Not that theres necessarily anything wrong with that either, it was kind of a mutual thing in all these cases. If you want to make some longer lasting friends, sport clubs are really good for this, at least thats my experience. Some of the smaller/more focused normal clubs are pretty good for it too (or so i'd imagine).

[lynt.br]

Agree with KP that it's really easy to know a lot of people at uni but a lot harder to make close friends. I found it was really easy at uni to have 100+ people you could speak to/know the names of but still have <10 people you'd feel comfortable asking to hang out outside uni with. You have to take the initiative to interact with people outside the academic context otherwise those people will be stuck in the 'acquaintance' zone. As much as you said you don't like this, I highly recommend joining clubs or going to university social events. Being able to interact with people and being socially competent is a life skill and it's an excuse to say you are just 'introverted' and don't want to do these things. Uni should be about trying new things and meeting new people. There are literally thousands of students at most universities and there's bound to be at least a handful with common interests.

So in short join and club and go to their events. It's a great way to meet people outside an academic context, which makes you more comfortable with them = friends yay.