Absolutely agree with what Owlbird has said above. Just going to add my two cents here, having lived through 4 years of uni and making friends that I still talk to on a regular basis 2 years out.
I'm scared about making new friends when i start next year. I'm naturally an unapproachable person who doesn't open up very easily. I only have one person that i'm extremely close to and the rest i would consider friends or acquaintances. while this close friend of mine is also likely to join the course i want to do next year, i would still like to branch out and meet new people.
For a long time pre-uni, I was like this too. I'd sort of end up making friends with one person who seemed friendly-ish enough and stick to them like glue that eventually I would talk to the friends that they'd make along the way and become friends by association.
For uni, what helped was remembering that most others are in the same sort of scenario, as Owlbird has said - everyone wants to make friends but are a little nervous making them, particularly at the start. What I found most helpful was chatting with classmates/ group mates during group projects and keeping in touch with people who I saw regularly/ again and genuinely wanted to befriend. The next time I saw them, I would ask to add them on social media e.g. "friend" each other on Facebook. If they had mutual friends, sometimes I would start conversations on that.
I also found each new semester as a bit of a 'reset' button, in that I'd find more new people to talk to and befriend by asking simple low-hanging personal questions e.g. "Oh what other classes do you have?" when I was waiting for a lecture and asked them if the seat next to them was free (note: this was pre-COVID, but the equivalent right now would probably be when you're waiting for a lecturer's slides to load or when a lecturer is fixing technical issues). Some other examples would include:
- "What course are you studying?"
- "What are you majoring/minoring in?"
- "What year are you in?" - Not everyone is a first year student doing first year units (unit = subjects) at uni.
- "How are you feeling about [insert unit here]/ [insert assessment here for the unit you're both taking]?"
- "How are you faring in lockdown?/ How are you?" (or anything about the pandemic, if you're still stuck in that situation next year)
Notice that the questions I listed above are hardly intrusive; this might alleviate that barrier of feeling unapproachable, but also not having to really open up. In my own experience, I found that academic-related questions usually helped to break that first barrier in a lot of people, although there's, of course, many other ways you can approach this.
i heard joining clubs was a good opportunity to meet new people but since the cohort is already so large and many people have said that uni can be lonely, i'm afraid that finding people to become close with will be difficult and challenging.
Absolutely, clubs and club events are a good opportunity to meet new people! Classes/labs (where applicable) and online uni events are also great places to meet people, as well as social sports, in-person events and on-campus activities (e.g. just getting your regular cup of coffee on campus) when things get back to our new COVID-normal.
Part of becoming close friends at uni for me was also about
maintaining contact outside of classes, especially those that lasted. People that I still have as friends from uni often were the ones where I regularly checked up on, the ones I met up with outside of class (or even just have lunch between classes on campus), went to events outside of uni with and/or phone/ video called at one point or another.
I've heard from my psych mentors and others that they didn't make any lasting friendships til 2nd year.
It was the same here. A lot of my current friends that I kept from uni are people from second year onwards.