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Passage
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Freshman
Friendship
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Three Months
is a Long Time |
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For freshmen, and especially for us, saying goodbye at the end
of the first year can feel like saying goodbye forever.
Three months can seem like a long
time when you are leaving friends and acquaintances
whom you have only known for a year. Your freshman year moments
are irreplaceable.
My advice to any freshmen reading this is to cherish those moments.
You may grow completely apart from the people you spent your
first year with, or you may find yourself fortunately comparing
them to siblings
at the end of your junior year as I did.
Even
if you have almost forgotten your freshman year roommates
two years later, and barely
recognize
them when you encounter
them in front of the gymnasium,
you can never replace
that year and the brand-new feeling that your first year of
college brings.
Roommates
and Majors in American Colleges
Freshman roommates are usually assigned randomly,
with no attention to their majors, and may have little
in common with one another either academically or personally.
They may take none of the same classes, and do not have
to choose their majors the first year. In future years
it's very easy to change roommates, and in the junior
or senior year it's quite common for students to move
to off-campus apartments. So there's much less likelihood
that freshman roommates will become lifelong friends.
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A lot will change after your freshman year. You will meet new
people and do new things. You will do a lot more growing up.
At
the beginning of our senior year, Karen took her hometown boyfriend
Kevin on a tour of campus and downtown. "That's where we
grew up," she told him, motioning
toward Atherton Hall, where the four of us spent our first two
years at Penn State.
We learned more outside the classroom than we learned inside
it. That dorm is where we learned and discussed the lessons
of our freshman and sophomore years. I think the principal
lesson I learned was the definition
of true friendship.
And I have never had nor will ever have better teachers than
Alisa, Karen and Gabrielle.
American and Chinese Friendships
Americans are very adapt at making new friends, while
Chinese people are
very skillful at keeping their old friends. The main
reason for this is that Americans experience more changes
in their personal circumstances, such as changing jobs,
moving to another town, or getting divorced. At any
given time an American may have only a few close friends
but many casual acquaintances. Over the course of a
lifetime an American will probably have more friends
than a Chinese person has but a Chinese person may have
more lifelong friends. |
That lesson can best be summarized
by something Alisa and Karen told me when I was upset
at the end of last semester and needed a shoulder to cry on.
They said no matter how far we drift apart or who else we become
friends with after college, we will always incline
to recall
each other first whenever we think of college.
I couldn’t agree more.
The story Alisa told on that balcony is far from over. I sometimes
wonder if the following is how it will end:
“…and those four little girls grew up and realized their dreams.
They found themselves all over the country, from farms, to cities,
to the suburbs, doing everything they wanted to do – a computer
technician,
a physician,
an attorney,
and an architect
---with the companions they wanted in husbands, children and
pets.
And occasionally
they would make it back to reunions
at that mythical valley and see their old friends, laughing
about the good times. They had succeeded in forgetting any of
the bad times.
And they lived happily ever after.”
Class Reunions
In
many Western countries it is customary for the people
who graduated from a college or school in the same
year to gather periodically at the campus or in their
hometown for a class reunion. It often includes parties,
dinners, dancing, golfing, bowling, and other special
events such as visits with former teachers. Reunions
usually occur every five years, beginning five years
after graduation. Certain reunions such as the 10th,
25th, and 50th are often considered special, and are
more elaborate than the others.
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