<p>batman: haha cool!! maybe a lot of ppl at cal are trying to find “close friends” but there’s so many ppl there you just never get to meet the right ones.
does your bday also happens to be on the 17th?</p>
<p>So what you’re telling me is that no one makes close friends at berkeley?</p>
<p>No, It’s not impossible…I’ve found the deepest and most meaningful life found in the God’s love, the Gospel, the truth of who I am, and in the invaluable friendships/community I’ve been lucky to have made/found through my Christian fellowship.</p>
<p>Although I do agree-it can be hard, especially when the places you’ve looked or the paths you’ve tried aren’t exactly the ideal places to find what you’re looking for… for instance, parties aren’t exactly the best place to find meaningful friendships, and being fake or trying to fit in will only get you further away from the real yearnings of closeness and authenticity… </p>
<p>And although Streaming seems to have good intentions, the fact that one has a Cal degree isn’t exactly the all-resolving consolation to the deeper disconnect, loneliness, and depression of Deadbear, whose cause goes deeper than merely some “brain chemicals” that need to get “checked out.” That statement is even somewhat degrading.</p>
<p>"Although I do agree-it can be hard, especially when the places you’ve looked or the paths you’ve tried aren’t exactly the ideal places to find what you’re looking for… for instance, parties aren’t exactly the best place to find meaningful friendships, and being fake or trying to fit in will only get you further away from the real yearnings of closeness and authenticity…</p>
<p>And although Streaming seems to have good intentions, the fact that one has a Cal degree isn’t exactly the all-resolving consolation to the deeper disconnect, loneliness, and depression of Deadbear, whose cause goes deeper than merely some “brain chemicals” that need to get “checked out.” That statement is even somewhat degrading."</p>
<p>+1 on the above</p>
<p>To add some more general thoughts (not necessarily directed at the OP)</p>
<p>I often wonder what people are really expecting when it comes to friendship in college, at Cal or anywhere else. Do you seek to find a meaningful friendship with one, two, or many people? A lot of people I know are more concerned about “networking” (on the short list of words I hate most in the English language). Did you have close friends before coming to Cal, how long did it take those friendships to form, on what basis were those friendships formed (shared time, shared interests, other?), and under what circumstances? Now fast forward to Cal, and were those actions repeated? Obviously the conditions weren’t the same (radically new environment, different responsibilities, maturity levels), but I suspect many people don’t do enough to D-E-V-E-L-O-P good friendships with one or a couple of friends, especially outside an academic or alcohol-related setting. </p>
<p>Bringing it back closer to home, from the fourth grade through my first year of college-- a span of 10 years-- I attended seven different schools full-time. Each school wasn’t the same, and the type of people were very different, so I found myself having to adapt to many different environments. Thankfully there were good people at most schools who reached out to me, but not all (ugh, and that made things really difficult). I would imagine the standard fare for most students is that they entered elementary school, continued with friends onto middle school, split half their friends when they went to separate high schools, before coming to college with only a short list of acquaintances (and likely not really good friends, anyways). And that’s where the problem arises. I suppose you can take solace in not having to face the trauma of being uprooted and dropped into a new world at age 11, then 12, then 14… it’s all a part of one’s personal development, you really learn a lot about yourself, and take it from me, you will be better off down the road. </p>
<p>If there’s one thing I would warn any incoming freshmen against, it’s pretending to be something you’re not. It doesn’t always have to sound this sinister, many students package this mentality as anything from “trying something new” to “going outside my comfort zone” to the catch-all ultimate college euphemism, “experimentation.” The downside’s not always apparent. You see, there’s no guarantee that the person you project yourself to be will be liked, and if you found yourself in a position where you felt the need to modify your natural self/inclination, then there’s something that you don’t like enough about yourself that you felt a change is in order. And if it comes to fruition that nobody likes the new You (yes, social people clearly see through the fake bull), then you’re left with no one liking either versions of You. Enter Despair. I would advise to stay the course and honestly be yourself, others be darned. </p>
<p>So is there a good way to make quality friendships? I have found the best-- short of the term “surefire”-- methods involve joining an organization. No, it DOES NOT end there. You see, if you join a group or club, all that means is that there are some other like-minded people like you sharing a space, not unlike any upper-division course (you guys were obviously attracted to the same subject matter). The key ingredient to foster meaningful friendships is by taking away the most killer denominator in college-- ACADEMICS! (Addendum: to rid yourself of thinking about school, it’s best to be at a neutral site. It can still be on campus, even in a classroom, but it shouldn’t be a familiar place. For example, your room, your dorm, or the primary meeting room of an organization are not ideal places.) I have found that going on organized weekend retreats through organizations, or working together with a group of people on a long-term, non-school-related project through an organization (like a play, theater production, publication, etc.), are the best ways to really get to know people. Adding one to Facebook does not a friend make.</p>
<p>One last story. One of the reasons I chose Cal was because I felt that this school, more than any of the other colleges I was accepted to, afforded me the best opportunity to comingle with other students of a similar socioeconomic background. Now, it’s great that I have formed many friendships with students from many backgrounds during my years at Cal, but there remained this longing to find someone I can truly relate to (I mean, there’s no tangible, inherent value here, but there was a definite desire to locate him, her, or them for my own sanity). Now, I had a part-time job my final semester, and my work carried through a week after my last finals. I had known this co-worker for nearly 6-7 months or so, and we always had pleasant exchanges and a healthy respect for one another. Naturally we talked to one another regularly due to the nature of our work, but nothing of any real value (read: small talk). But our final assignment, and he had also just graduated, was to go to San Francisco and stay at the hotel over there for close to a week. And you know how it goes, even with your dorm mates, when you share a room and the lights go out before sleep, there’s always that light (yet strangely meaningful) debriefing where you unload your final worries onto your roommate before a peaceful rest. As the week progressed, it became apparent that he and I were EXACTLY alike. I mean, eerily similar. It was incredible how things unfolded, because it was without a doubt a revelation, and something of an affirmation that I had come to Cal for the right reasons. You see, it was after those many conversations that week with him-- after we had both graduated!-- that I realized that there were definitely people like me out there, all around me, all the time on campus, but I just never got the chance to really know them (and, internalizing a bit, but I can’t help but figure how I could have better reached out to others, whoever they may be).</p>
<p>I’ve had a pretty similar experience to burgundycherry. I’m my second semester now, have a couple of close friends, but one of them is a senior and graduating, the other is living like 30 mins away from campus next year. Honestly, it is quite weird for me since I had about a 40 really close friends in high school, but at the end of the day, you just gotta suck it up and move on. And like Batman17, if I ever feel lonely/really bored, I just go to the gym/play soccer.</p>
<p>Has anybody on here taken a Meyer-Briggs test? I am a textbook INTJ, and I just can’t interact with others in the same way that normal people do. I am always talking about something I am intensely interested in and I can’t maintain the casual chatter that most people have with one another. I think this prevents me getting from the “acquaintance” to “friend” stage with people, but I am still hoping I will eventually find a few people that I can really bond with.</p>
<p>im going to Cal next year, i didn’t really like high school… i was hoping that berkeley might be different. but reading what you guys said made me scared…</p>
<p>experiences are different for everyone. why didn’t you like your high school? </p>
<p>The difference is that Cal gets too impersonal sometimes and that really leaves the kids who are not as loud behind.</p>
<p>wow burgundy, I feel like my first year was the exact opposite of you. First semester I was really excited, made a lot of friends and loved Cal. Second semester I started realizing that all those “friends” were just acquaintances and that it was really hard to find people you identify with and would be close to no matter what. It didn’t help that I tried to kill myself with school and work. The worst part is hearing other people talking about how college was the best time of their lives. If this is the best, does that mean it will only go downhill from here? But I try to remain optimistic and hopeful for next fall.</p>
<p>Liquidus, i’m a ISTJ. same here 
we’re just more reserved.</p>
<p>I’m happy (knock on wood.)</p>
<p>that’s what she said</p>
<p>op, even though i dont go to cal, i COMPLETELY relate to you. i’m also about to graduate, and ended up still alone</p>
<p>btw, how is it like in grad school at cal? is it easier to make closer friends and find a niche of friends?</p>
<p>I graduated 2 years ago, and I felt the same thing. I ended up becoming suicidal too. My parents cut off their emotional support, therapists were abusive, and I ended up just having to accept the way the world is and toughen up. It’s still really hard sometimes, but nobody in life is going to help you, like a lot of other posters here say, and Berkeley does prepare you for the real world in a sense. You have to be able to rely only on yourself and learn to take care of yourself emotionally.</p>
<p>I tried to be friends with people but I picked the wrong ones, type As with psychological problems as well who just want to tear you down to feel better about themselves. Then I felt there was something wrong with me and I couldn’t make friends. I stopped making any effort at all and ironically people then treated me with respect and made friendly overtures. I took a class where we had to talk about our personalities and let classmates critique us, and after that I blamed myself for being too quiet so I tried to force myself to talk a lot and act friendly. Then I noticed that people treated me with disrespect and that if I acted like I wanted to be friends with people they would act like I must be a loser.</p>
<p>I had my fellow students try to screw me over, acting friendly to trick me into sharing my notes with them and then as soon as they got them they no longer talked to me. </p>
<p>Other times if I was just a little friendly to a girl she would immediately give me her phone number and email and want to go out and drink together right then. One girl wanted to tell me about everyone she’d ever slept with, another just wanted to find out what connections I had and then reject me when she found out I was hungry for friends.
I met some other people who I think were nicer, but at the time I just wanted to protect myself and so I started acting like everyone else, like if someone was friendly to me I had to act standoffish.</p>
<p>I also got sexually harassed or just treated abusively or uncaringly by profs in the PACS department and the Ethnic Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies departments. This Ethnic Studies professor who made advances towards me also told me that everyone in life who tries to make you feel bad is just doing it so they can take your job/career and life chances for themselves. I didn’t understand that at the time. I got completely disillusioned. I had had all these social justice ideals before, and held myself to really strict ethical standards. I had to recognize that all these profs were hypocrites and so were the cutthroat students, and that all they cared about was getting ahead no matter what ideals they preached. I felt that I had to try to get ahead too, then, and I tried “networking”, but then people treated me disrespectfully. Sometimes when I’d try to talk to people they’d realize I didn’t have friends and try to make me feel bad about it, and brag about how many friends they had. </p>
<p>I had to learn that you can’t go around being open with everybody, you have to hide things about yourself and refuse to answer some questions, you have to be wary of others’ motivations and protect yourself. You can’t trust someone until you’ve watched their behavior for a long time. No matter how pretty the ideals Berkeley liberals preach, all they really care about is getting ahead, no matter who they have to step on to get to the top. At Berkeley, as in real life, people only want to be “friends” if you have something they want. I keep having people treat me badly until they find out I graduated from Berkeley, then they start trying to get me into their “network”. Nobody wants to be friends with you at Cal if they see you as a threat, as competition, unless they think that by getting close to you they can find out your secrets and become just like you. It’s the same in real life. And if you want to be able to support yourself at a job you actually like, and get other good things in life, you have to work really hard all the time and don’t have time to spend just socializing anyway. You only give your time to people who could be useful to you. So I think that real friends are very rare in real, adult life. </p>
<p>However, that thing that people do at Cal where they pretend they don’t remember who you are, or act like you must be a loser if you’re friendly to them, I think that behavior is pathetic now. An important thing I learned was to not put up with disrespectful behavior. You don’t have to be nice to everyone and be friends with everyone.
You have to be yourself, protect yourself from others, accept reality, work hard towards your goals, be ok with being alone. Be wise to the games people play, and feel grateful when you meet the rare person who tries to be respectful to everybody, and who seems genuinely good hearted. Don’t worry about not having friends. Wait for quality people.</p>
<p>And about only talking about things you’re truly interested in, I bet you’re a really interesting person then. Make sure that even if you try to change things about yourself, to always remain the kind of person YOU want to be. </p>
<p>There’s a book that helps me when I start falling into despair. It’s called “Keep Going,” and it talks about how you shouldn’t give up until you’re forced to give up. Don’t quit while you still have another step in you. And that it doesn’t matter how small a step you take, if you just keep taking these steps you’ll get out of the rough spots in life. And how once you can look back on things, you’ve survived them.</p>
<p>Good luck. It helped me to read your post.</p>
<p>you guys are the type of people who would benefit most from a 420 session…if nothing else, it encourages a friendly bonding environment and experience. you’d be surprised how many people you meet and how many friends you make passing the peace-pipe</p>
<p>i agree with bearwithme. i’m not a ‘stoner’ by any means, but nothing beats a good 420 sesh.</p>
<p>Cal was not my first choice, and reading threads such as this one makes me regret committing to berkeley. I’m getting more and more attached to the close friends I have now and I’m scared to let go. I’m a very open person with a dozen or more best friends in various social cliques, but I’m worried that i won’t even have 1 or 2 to confide in when I get to Cal. :(</p>
<p>Well, I’m an introvert too…In fact, I’m an engineer, but I gotta say I had a great first year at Cal and made quite a few close friends.</p>
<p>But then like its_cal, I’ve been uprooted from multiple schools and cities in my childhood, and I was bullied throughout my elementary school period when I was really shy and socially awkward so coming to college wasn’t very scary to me. Besides that though, I feel like there were several other parts of my experience that I felt made my year great.</p>
<p>When I think about my year and how I got to know people its really interesting. First semester, I took this really difficult class called BioE10, and 20 something of us would get together to do the homework for 8 hours straight and then we would take a break together for an hour at late night in the dining commons while complaining about how ridiculously hard the class was for freshman. In my math discussion, my GSI also helped us bond by telling us to do the math from these discussion worksheets on the blackboard in groups while he went around helping us. Even after we stopped taking these classes together, I still feel like I’m friends with these people because there is something about the devotion of working together as a team that really helped me connect with them. Second semester, I took a really engaging math seminar which helped me in making more friends with classmates and even a professor. It was a completely discussion based seminar, and every class we would spend the entire hour discussing math, technology, science, and social issues. We even came on the day the professor cancelled the class and spent the time getting to know each other. </p>
<p>I am also great friends with my two wonderful roommates. We were three very different people. I’m a typical engineering major in that I couldn’t stop talking about math and science and relating everything to math and science and I always needed to keep my space clean.
One of my roommates was really smart and artsy and spent most of her time reading or knitting while my other roommate was witty and clever and loved to read cooking blogs or watch cooking shows. Bother weren’t very enthusiastic about organizing their stuff. However, we all bonded while going to parties together, shopping together, watching a cooking show together, listening ramble about how so many things we do in life involve the principles of math, and discussing which shoes, outfit, knitting pattern, etc. was the prettiest. One of my favorite memories with them was just before Christmas when we all got each other presents and we decided that we’d wait until after finals to give them to each other. Except we were all so excited to see what the others would react to our gifts that we exchanged presents on the night before the first day of finals. I remember how the three of us played this card game called Weed while eating smoked gouda cheese with bread in our room while everyone else was studying like mad.</p>
<p>My best friend and I bonded through a very late homework assignment. We first met through a club activity but we didn’t actually become really close until one morning when we went to BioE 10 lecture and the professor told us we had homework due that day and the latest it was accpeted was 5 PM. We both forgot we had homework due so we ran back to our dorms and started working on it together before we had other classes. Even though my grade on this particular homework assignment did bring down my overall grade in the class, I made a great friend who I think I’ll be friends with all my life. </p>
<p>I’m sorry for spending so much time detailing how great my year was, but I really enjoy all of the wonderful memories I have with all the people I’ve met and made friends with (I could go on and on). I had rough spots with all these people every once in a while but in the end we all got along. I think the important thing is that other than just being yourself and rambling about what you love, math and science in my case, it is also important to be accepting and forgiving. People aren’t flawless diamonds and they can be cruel but the most important thing is to accept that people are the way they are. After I get hurt by or mad at a friend, I always think through the situation and find my own faults. Typically, I realize that I did indeed have some fault in the situation and I would apologize to that other person. Sometimes apologizing is hard since apologizing can wound your pride or self-esteem, but personally, I feel that pride/self-esteem aren’t as important as having a great friend. Sometimes its about making compromises, because living with people who are so different from myself is hard so you have to find a way for everyone to achieve some of their goals. </p>
<p>Also, if you don’t find close friends immediately, don’t give up all hope. Sometimes meeting the right people or just getting to really know the people around you takes some time and effort. I remember at the beginning of first semester I hadn’t made any close friends I tried to cling to my old close high school friends except they were all off doing their own thing and I felt rather abandoned and lonely. My roommates and I ended up discussing this sort of situation together and afterwards I just didn’t care as much about clinging to my high school friends anymore because I least I knew I wasn’t the only one. </p>
<p>Another thing I realized was that I really didn’t know myself so how could I expect others to get to know me or myself to get to know others. “Know thyself,” sounds like such a cliche, but knowing yourself really helps other people know you and you know other people. I didn’t even know I liked math at all until I came to Berkeley and knowing that little fact about myself helped me make a lot of friends. </p>
<p>Sorry for this long post, but I just wanted to bring some optimism to contrast the pessimism.</p>
<p>I would say that it really depends on your willingness and ability to go out and take the initiative in making new friends. Friends won’t come to you if you just sit around and do nothing. Especially during the first few weeks of school, almost all other freshmen will be the same as you - looking for new friendships while adjusting to a new atmosphere. It is then where you should take the initiative and go introduce yourself and make new friends.
Also, your roommates will become your close friends. You’ll be living with them for a year, so you’ll really get to know your roommates (even if they are upperclassman).</p>
<p>To answer OP’s original question … Am I happy at Cal? I would say I’m satisfied. I’m not that happy, yet I’m also not that sad. There are times when my courses get tough and the projects sometimes overwhelm me to pull all-nighters, but I always go through them with my roommates and close friends, and in the end the opportunities outweigh all of the negative things I have.
An advice that one of my professors once said is to learn how to balance your life. Cal will be hard, harder than anything you’ve encountered in your high school life (especially if you’re going in science or engineering majors). But the most successful students aren’t the ones who always study. They are the ones who organize their time wisely, so that they can savor the college experience (being happy and having fun) while maintaining good grades.</p>
<p>Negative experiences are a part of life…everywhere, regardless of where you go.</p>
<p>In general, Berkeley is great. Probably the best place in my life so far.</p>