Subtly being forced into isolation

College Life
1

<p>Some background info about me:</p>

<ol>
<li>I'm a mechanical engineering student at University of Iowa. No one from my hometown is attending the university.</li>
<li>I plan on getting around 3.5 GPA to transfer to UIUC's engineering program. And I intend on achieving that GPA at all cost.</li>
<li>I'm involved in three engineering groups, SAE baja, ASME, and AIAA.</li>
<li>I'd hardly ever participate in my high school in my bid to get the best ACT and GPA, and during senior year was when I actually befriended other people. I also skipped every single homecoming and prom since I saw them as a waste of time and money.</li>
<li>I've been fighting depression alone for the past five years. Two separate counselors only made it worse or wasted my time.</li>
</ol>

<p>I did everything that was in the textbooks for incoming college freshmen. Actively meet people, get involved, etc, etc, etc.</p>

<p>I'm one of the two only engineering students on my floor, everyone else are majoring in business. And the other engineering student hardly ever studies and has a drinking problem.</p>

<p>Next door are a group of the least academically Chinese international students I came across. They party almost every night, and at least one of them is on academic probation. Another got kicked out of the business major program for not taking enough core business classes.</p>

<p>Of course, the other business majors also party frequently, though most of them sit around and play Xbox or watch TV. My floor agreed on getting at least a 2.5 GPA during a floor meeting, and most of them have the mentality of "C's get degrees".</p>

<p>My roommate is quiet and studies a lot, which makes the bitter pill a bit more tolerable. However, we have nothing else in common, since he's studying finance and seems to be very interested in US Geography and fitness, and I'm sitting there doing chem pre-lab, calc, or engineering paper format work.</p>

<p>Making friends in my residential hall is not an option. Almost all of the engineering students are in a dedicated engineering or honors residential hall, and for some reason, I got put in the pre-med/business/athletics residential hall. I've attempted to transfer to the engineering and honors halls, but there are no open spots, nor are anyone willing to swap rooms.</p>

<p>I found a partial solution by studying in the main engineering building, chemistry building, or the law library, so I can avoid the chaos in my residential hall. But most of the studying is done alone, and I often walk past people in the hall without saying much to them.</p>

<p>During lecture/discussion time, there's a few people that are familiar with me, but aren't exactly friends. There's also a group of girls that have a passive-aggressive attitude against me and refuse to acknowledge that I exist since the first day of class starting. They just happen to be friends with the people that I'm also trying to be friends. </p>

<p>I attempted to join or organize a study group, but either no one is interested, or the study group becomes very counter-productive of my time.</p>

<p>For the three engineering groups, I rarely see any of the members outside of the meetings or lecture/discussion times.</p>

<p>Everyday, I'm increasingly finding myself eating alone or with people that I'm probably rarely going to see again. </p>

<p>I do not want to repeat high school again.</p>

2

<p>You do not seem to be a very fun person to be around. Relax, enjoy your youth, meet people, have fun, and of course study. But please don’t forget to be a human being - it’s the most important part.</p>

3

<p>On a side note, I was rejected from two fraternities. Both of them related to engineering or honors. Both felt that I didn’t participate in enough rush events, and I didn’t because they conflicted with my class schedule.</p>

<p>No one seemed to be aware of my depression (including my family), except for the counselors obviously.</p>

4

<p>Don’t blame things on your depression. Is it there? Sure. Does it suck? Yes. Does that mean you should cut yourself off from people and stop making an effort? Of course not.</p>

<p>Honestly, it sounds like your isolation is self-imposed. You seem to look down on anyone who does anything but study, and that’s a bad attitude to have… especially if you want to make friends.</p>

<p>Don’t blacklist your entire floor from you friend list just because they go out at night. I’m not saying you should turn into a party person, or that you need to go out and drink, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make friends with them. Say hello, strike up a conversation, whatever. Who knows, maybe you’ll find you have something in common. (No, having a different major does not mean you have nothing in common. Try harder.)</p>

<p>For study groups… I’m not sure what you want. You seem upset that you’re not being more social, but it seems that when a situation does get social, you reject it for being a “waste of time”. Yes, when you have a group of students working together for hours on end, it’s going to get a bit silly and unproductive sometimes. Unless you’re pressed for time, surely you can take a little break from studying once in a while. Even if you’d work faster alone, a study group might be a good way to get out of your bubble a bit. It’s still a pretty academic setting, but you can joke around and hang out with people too… and honestly it sounds like you might be a bit uncomfortable with purely social settings right now. Can’t say I blame you for that though, people are terrifying.</p>

<p>Girls: Have you tried actually talking to them? You say they “refuse” to acknowledge you… have you tried acknowledging them? If you have and they just don’t want to be friends, don’t sweat it, but it doesn’t sound like you’ve reached out to them anymore than they’re reaching out to you.</p>

<p>Personally, I’d suggest you start talking to people from your class. Strike up a conversation before lecture starts, or hang around afterwards, maybe ask someone if they want to go do something together, or work on a problem set, whatever. Just keep at it, pretend to be social and eventually you’ll get somewhere.</p>

<p>Also, you mentioned transferring at the beginning… are the reasons purely academic? Cause socially, it sounds like your problems would follow you regardless of the school you’re at, so I wouldn’t try to transfer if it’s primarily for social reasons.</p>

<p>tl;dr: You’re isolating yourself. You can’t both label all social interaction as a waste of time and still expect to make friends.</p>

5

<p>I’m not blaming stuff on my depression.</p>

<p>Over the summer, I attended many of my friends’ parties, because I had the time. I’m an engineering student now, and with the coursework load, I simply can not go out at night or do anything that the business majors are doing.</p>

<p>As for the study groups, yes I know it’s going to be social, but when it turns into nothing more than a get-together-and-talk, I get a bit frustrated.</p>

<p>As for the girls, I did talk to them several times (around once every two weeks). They either shy away and attempt to end the conversation ASAP or blatantly ignore me and not reply back at all.</p>

<p>I do talk to people frequently before/after lectures, though its only making a very minor progress.</p>

<p>I’m transferring for mainly financial reasons. One of my parents work there, so there’s a student tuition discount. $40K vs $25 annual total tuition. Plus, about half of my HS friends go to UIUC, but that’s just a bonus, not a reason.</p>

6

<p>^Okay, so what if you thought about the study groups as more of a social thing than an academic thing? Use it as a way to meet people and make friends–that’s what you want, right? Inevitably, if you want to make and maintain friendships, you’ll have to sacrifice some studying time.</p>

7

<p>It sounds like you’re digging yourself into a hole. Yes, as an engineering student you will generally have a lot of schoolwork, but in order to make friends, you have to sacrifice some study time in order to build relationships. A lot of friendships I made in college solidified not when I was sitting in my dorm room, studying, but when I was goofing off in my residence hall. </p>

<p>You definitely have things in common with those in your hall-you just haven’t found them yet! Keep trying to form study groups, and don’t worry if you aren’t as efficient with your work as you could be alone-since your major is so work-heavy, this seems like a good way to meet people. Have you looked into other clubs? Just because you didn’t get into a fraternity doesn’t mean that there aren’t any other student groups out there.</p>

8

<p>Why do you feel like you have to be the same major as someone to have things in common with them? I’m an English major and my best friends are studio art, pre-med, nursing, anthro social work… there are things to talk about other than classes. I think this goes back to your mentality that studying is most important above all other things. Like others have said, if study groups turn into chats, just think of that time as a socialization/chat time. You can study later. Talk to people about things other than engineering-- tv shows? movies? books? When I get back to my apartment I’ll complain to my roommate about a huge essay I have to write, and she’ll talk about this chemistry lab she has to do. We can commiserate over our workloads without having identical ones. Also have you tried joining clubs that aren’t engineering in nature?</p>

9

<p>i think you know what you want to do, get good enough grades and tranfer to UIUC. that’s your plan to escape isolation and make your depression better, right? transfer schools to where you know a lot of kids and maybe be put in a residence hall that better suits you. do you plan to transfer there next year? or the year after? maybe you can forget about making friends at the school you’re currently at if you’re going to transfer fairly soon anyway and cope with being mostly alone until then (but maybe that wouldn’t be good for preparing you for a smoother transition to UIUC…). also what happens if you transfer but things <em>don’t</em> really change like you hope. that won’t be good. and probably that could happen since you don’t have the best history of integrating yourself with other kids (though the fact that you did senior year of high school does say something). then what? another therapist? do you have significant interests in things? do you like people? do you know whose friends you would want to be? what do you want, like what you had near the end of high school? i don’t really know why things aren’t working for you… well there is your depression, but what is that like?</p>

10

<p>the only person subtly forcing you into isolation is in the mirror.</p>

<p>You have listed all kinds of random reasons to exclude just about every kind of person you could find on a college campus from being eligible to be your friend.</p>

<p>You are limiting yourself, and then complaining about it.</p>

<p>Try eliminating your artificial limits, and actually engaging with real people instead of dismissing stereotypes.</p>

11

<p>In HS, the type of people that I frequently interacted and seek with were those that had the motivation to achieve their goals. I have a preference of surrounding myself with high achieving people.</p>

<p>One of my best friends had a research internship with the American Cancer Society at UIUC (and got to present the findings at a ACS conference in Chicago), and then had an internship with a chemical manufacturing firm before starting his freshman college year. Another one was brilliant with computer programming and server maintenance. All of them were also in athletics, such as football, soccer, and cross-country/track</p>

<p>I also befriended with those that didn’t have the same motivation, but still understood that having only a high school diploma would not be a good idea, and were openly friendly to me. Most of them were friends of friends that I had frequent opportunities to interact with.</p>

<p>Also during freshman year in HS, I briefly hung out with a certain group of people. I quickly realized that they were either going to jail in the future, drop out or not pursue any higher education or training beyond high school. I understood the concept of peer pressure and that friends define who you are, so I decided to avoid them to protect my goals. And I was correct about my intuition when that was exactly what happened to all of them.</p>

<p>A lot of the people on my floor share too many similarities to those that I avoided.</p>

12

<p>I don’t know where to start. You’re really judgemental and have a lot of excuses for things.</p>

<p>I don’t know why you just bragged about your “super successful” friends, that entire paragraph seems ridiculous. I can’t tell you how many special highschool/college snowflakes that couldn’t hack it in the real world.</p>

<p>I’d stop limiting yourself to only engaging with people who fit your seemingly arbitrary criteria- a few of those useless business majors will end up being your boss one day.</p>

13

<p>so…why are you at Iowa instead of at Illinois if you are a serious engineering major? Are the people at Iowa just below your standards? Like I said before, just look in the mirror for the source of your social problems.</p>