Collin Hess English 001 Social Narrative College is a truly unique place. In college you can completely change our personality, you can go from being someone with few friends, to someone who has more friends than they know what to do with. This happened to me, and here’s how it happened. First day of college, Sunday, August 28th, 2020. I came into UVM expecting to be friendless apart from a kid from my hometown, but I had the exact opposite experience, I was immediately immersed in an extremely active social scene. The first two people that I met were Peter and Patty, they were roommates down the hall from me, and we were out in Burlington that night, getting some pizza, when Peter asked if we wanted to go drive down to the breakwater and meet his hometown friend and his roommate. Patty and I said yes, and so we went, it only took us a few minutes to get down there, as Peter had his car. We met Ryan, Peter’s friend, Chris, Ben, and Liam (AKA Culkin). This was a formative night for all of us, as I ended up becoming close friends with all of them. This was the formation of the community that I consider myself to be closest with, my college friends. However, things didn’t stop there, soon the rest of the floor moved in and we realized that we all got along. This greatly expanded all of our social circles as now we had friends that we saw literally every day. But there was another group of people that we had yet to interact with, RAs. Now typically, RAs are thought of as mood killers, with their whole job being to ruing the fun of college students. This was exacerbated by covid, making it even harder for us to just run around and have a good time. However, we got lucky, the RA for our floor is one of the good ones, instead of punishing us for doing something stupid, he instead informs us as to how/why it is stupid and why we shouldn’t do it again. However, for the most part, the other RAs are exactly how we thought they would be. This led to several interactions between our two groups that almost never ended happily, and almost always created tension between us. This leads into our interactions with another group of people here at UVM, the administrators. Unlike RAs, we almost never see the administrators, yet they remain a part of our lives nonetheless. We as a group have had several instances where we come face to face with administrators. Most of the time together, but sometimes we are left to fend for ourselves. While the administration at UVM is not inherently evil, it can feel that way sometimes. Always introducing new rules to contain the spread of covid, which we understand, while also ruining most social opportunities. If our floor was not what it is, I doubt that any of us would have had as fulfilling of a first semester. This brings us to the other obstacle standing in our way of having a great first semester, homework. Homework is obviously an integral part of the college experience, yet it also creates arguably the most stress for college students. This was especially true for our group, as we were very quickly thrust into an environment that we were not familiar with, and then told to figure it out. However, with the support of each other and our RA we all made it through. Though homework did lead to some interesting situations. Such as several late nights (I’m talking like 4-5 am just doing homework), scrambles to get work done on time, and stress about group projects or large-scale writing assignments. While it definitely created an unholy amount of stress for all of us, it also created numerous bonding experiences, for instance the time I had to give a group presentation with a group of complete strangers. Or the time Peter and I were finishing an assignment just 10 minutes before it was due. Looking back on it, definitely not a good look, but at the time it allowed us to connect and become closer because of the shared stress. Another stressful part of college is other students, especially those that you are not familiar with. Several times we have invited people onto our floor, only for them to end up destroying or stealing something. I’m not saying that I don’t trust anyone that I don’t know, just that you definitely have to be a little bit more careful when there are unknown people on your floor. However sometimes these people can end up becoming part of your circle, this is exactly the situation that occurred with one individual, Chris. Chris would come to hangout with his friends that just happened to live on our floor and were part of our “group”, and he slowly started showing up more and more, and eventually merged with us. So while having someone you don’t know on your floor can definitely be stressful most of the time, sometimes it ends in a new friend. This is what I believe to be the epitome of what college is supposed to be about. Of course you are supposed to excel in school and learn how to deal with all your new freedom, but alongside those experiences comes a whole different set of experiences that have to do with your social skills, and refining them. As that is what truly is the most important thing in the larger scheme of things; being able to interact with others in a manner that creates a favorable relationship.
