I am having a hard time adjusting at school. I am friends with my roommate and girls around me but they have kind of formed their own group, they still invite me out sometimes but I feel like a tag along and we don’t really connect. In high school I had a great group of friends but all of my friends and even boyfriends I made because we were all on a team together so we all bonded. I tried to get involved by joining clubs and even a sports team but the sports team has morning practices that start at 5 and then later in the day I just sit in my dorm after class with nothing to do. Also I don’t really vibe with the people on the team most of them are upperclassmen that already has friend groups separate from the team. I know everybody is adjusting but they are have people they eat with and i feel alone. I try to stay on weekends but all I think about it how much I want to go home or go visit my high school friends at their colleges. I also have a spring admission from another school and I am thinking about taking it. Its a bigger school 20,000+ students compared to my school now that just has 2,000. I feel like it would be easier to find friends there with such big population but I am kind of scared of transferring and getting lost in the mix, also it is further away from home than my current school (my current school is an hour and a half and this one is almost 2 and half) so it makes me nervous that my high school friends and family couldn’t visit as much and it would be harder for me to get home. I am so torn on what to do but in my head i keep thinking “you only have three months left here” so maybe thats a sign i should transfer. Does anybody have any opinions? or has anyone shared a similar experience?
Well, going to a school with only 2000 students, you should expect the upperclassmen to already have cliques formed, because well, everyone basically meets the same people constantly and they usually have a much tighter knit group because of that. However, the upside to that is that you should have a much easier time forming a clique of your own. I go to a school with roughly 38,000 students and I can tell you right now, I end up eating alone a lot more than I’d like. It’s not because I haven’t made friends, but because our school is so large, that I only ever get to see them once or twice a day at most. Sometimes we do end up getting plans worked out, but our schedules all differ so drastically that it doesn’t seem worth the trouble most of the time.
As for your roommate and her group, if you don’t feel like you fit in, you could try making some other friends. Let me guess however, your roommate became friends with the girls around you first. And she then ended up introducing you to them? Because joining a group late can always give that feeling on not fitting in.
You also sound a bit homesick, and I honestly don’t think moving even further away from home is going to help that much. However, if you do think that you’ll be happier at the bigger school, then by all means transfer. (As long as that other school is in the same league academically as this one, because the first thing in college should be your education).
Personally, I’ve always felt like it would be easier to make friends at a smaller school. You see the same faces so often that you end up becoming acquainted with each other without even having to say much. As for bigger schools, you might be able to make a ton of “friends”, but don’t expect many of them to be that strong of friendships. It’s like choosing between a few friends or a ton of acquaintances. Plus, you have to go out of your way much more just to keep the relationships going. (I’ve only been in school for 3 weeks and I’ve already lost contact with like 5 friends that I’d met during first-week orientation).