<p>I'm going into my sophomore year at a school that is 50% commuter with a lot of international students. I'm a shy person to begin with but I'm finding it impossible to make friends. It seems everyone here is really antisocial and cliquey. As I've said, there are a lot of international students (mostly Asian). The Chinese/Korean/Indian/Middle Eastern students all stick to their own ethnic groups and speak their own language. The white students I've met are mostly commuters and many of them stick with the people they were friends with in high school. </p>
<p>I'm finding it really difficult to make any friends. I commute about 40 minutes to school. I've tried to join a club but the meetings were sporadic so I was hardly ever on campus when the club met. I've attended a few commuter events but hardly anyone went and almost everyone just stuck to the people they knew from high school. If I meet someone cool in a lecture I hardly ever see them again because the freshman classes have ~200 students.</p>
<p>Does it get easier to make friends once you get into small, higher level classes? What else can I do to put myself out there? The club choices are really limited and the club info section of the school website hasn't been updated since 2003. I don't party or drink, which is another obstacle. Last semester I hardly talked to anyone. I am close to my family and my high school friends but I still feel really alone, and I feel like moving out of my parents house (won't happen because I have no job or money) would only serve to make me completely alone 24/7. Two of my friends go to community college with no dorms and very few student activities - it depresses me that at this big research university of 25,000 students I feel I'm having the same college experience as them.</p>
<p>Everyone says college is the best time of your life but I hate this. I don't get any of the "college experience" and I feel like I am completely missing out on everything college is supposed to be. I don't really want to transfer because I love the professors in my department and feel I should just suck it up and finish my degree here. Any advice from commuters or anyone else?</p>
<p>I had/have basically the exact same conditions as you.</p>
<p>commuter school (about 80% commute)
35000 undergrads
intro classes with 150+ students
lots of minorities (asians/browns) sticking to themselves for the most part
none of my high school friends went to my school
other people seemed to already have friends
never had to make new friends since i grew up in a small city with mostly the same people</p>
<p>However, I still managed to make friends. The thing is, that you actually have to put in effort to making friends. You can’t just randomly talk to people in class and expect to be invited to parties and other things. </p>
<p>I never joined any clubs. I met friends mostly in labs or class. In labs i was given a partner and then I’d end up sitting with them in class. Some labs had groups of 4 even. This is engineering. When I was a math major I didn’t make a single friend since you go to class and leave. English had small class sizes (about 40) and was fairly interactive and I made a group of friends in the class but never hung out with them since we were in different programs and never saw each other outside of class.</p>
<p>It gets harder to make friends in later years. The situation would seem to provide an environment easy to make friends (smaller classes, more group projects, etc.) but people become less open to making friends in later years. People have already established social circles or friendships, school gets harder and people get more focused, and as people get used to university and older the excitement of university wears off and people don’t care as much about making friends anymore.</p>
<p>I’m sorry but you’re dropping way too much truth in this thread for anyone to feel comfortable replying to it. All of this “students are friends with the same people from high school” flies completely in the face of the clich</p>
<p>I agree with whistleblower’s post as well. I wasn’t going to mention it, but I met several women by just being good looking and either getting asked out on the spot or being sat next to and talked to. But this obviously isn’t something that you can control.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>browns is a standard term for indians/pakistanis/arabs/persians where i’m from. In the states I think that brown refers more to hispanics, but I’m not positive.</p>
<p>I doubt that it’s very pejorative, considering that UFC fighter Cain Velasquez has the tattoo “Brown Pride” on his chest. Either way, I didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. I don’t see how it’s different from white or black.</p>
It is? really? Because in the part of the state where I’m from, one particular state which shares a large part of its border with mexico… brown is what the indians/pakistanis/bangladeshis/arabs/persians/afghanistanis/south asians etc called themselves
but you know what…
[Brown</a> people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_people]Brown”>Brown (racial classification) - Wikipedia)
this is actually a pretty loose term lol</p>
<p>
what this guy said
history textbooks and primary school education already beat it in us that race is the most sensitive issue</p>
<p>I guess it’s like the n-word where its connotation is dependent upon the ethnicity of the person using it–not that I agree with that–or the way in which it’s used. It is just a color like black or white, but these things take on different meanings as time progresses. To use an African-American example again, about 60 years ago, the term negro wasn’t offensive, but now it’s viewed much differently, even though it’s just the Spanish word for black. </p>
<p>Yellow is also just a color, but many Asian people take offense to the term being used to label them. There were allegations of an ad for a TV being racist because the advertisement was used primarily to promote the fact that the TV used yellow in its color scheme, as opposed to the typical format, and it just so happened that they got an Eastern Asian guy to play the scientist in the commercial. There was also another incident down here in GA where the yellow line of MARTA–our metro train system–had to be changed to the gold line because it coincidentally (or maybe not) ended at an area primarily populated by Asians.</p>
<p>It’s cool though. Sorry for that misunderstanding.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>wow, I guess it is pretty loose. I knew it could refer to South Asians, but I didn’t realize it was such an ambiguous term. The article does list Mexicans though, and that seems to be the new group of people who are associated with it in this country, during this age of debates about immigration reform.</p>
<p>You are a high-IQ, independently-minded white male. You may as well have aspergers no matter how eloquently you equivocate you are when discussing race. You trying to discuss race is like a palestinian trying to live in palestine. You ‘lost’ this ‘debate’ before you were even born.</p>
<p>Get involved in some classes and ECs that require group interaction.</p>
<p>Being on intramural or other sports teams
Taking theater, chorale or physical fitnesses classes
Helping back stage with school theater production. Of course, being on stage is a great way of meeting people, too.
Participating in campus community service projects also is a good way of meeting people</p>