First arriving at university was a nerve racking experience for me, as it is for many students. When I first went to college I was arriving in the middle of the pandemic during spring semester. I was in a city I had never been to before where I knew nobody. Even though I didn’t see it at the time, it was a lot to handle for a teenager who had lived in the same town for the first eighteen years of her life. I was of course incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to further my education, and to study comfortably in a place I felt safe in, but those drawbacks gave me a lot of anxiety when first arriving at college.
One of the greatest challenges of this early period in college for me was figuring out how to not only meet people, but turn those first meetings into meaningful conversations, and even friendships. For me, the answer was coffee. Coffee is something I was slowly becoming addicted to at the time for a couple reasons. I was dealing with a workload I had never experienced before, so the caffeine was definitely helping me get through my schoolwork, but coffee was also helping me socially. As I connected with people in classes or at different events around campus, I just started to ask if they wanted to grab coffee. It was a way for me to comfortably further connections and gradually make lasting friendships out of my acquaintances on campus.
Coffee is something that is societally a symbol of so many things. In America, it represents the rather unhealthy busy culture, but it also has become a way for people to gather together in a social setting for casual meetings among friends. Whether it is to meet with a study group, see an old friend, or get to know new people, coffee is a representative and even a catalyst of connection. I recommend that if you are a college student, you try to use a coffee date or a similar equivalent if you don’t drink caffeine, to gather with friends. The most important thing is to find a way that is comfortable for you to reach out to new people. These connections could after all become some of the closest relationships in our lives. I know that for me, it paid off to put myself out there, introduce myself to new people in college, and do what I could to cultivate friendships out of those connections. Not all of those coffee dates led to friendships of course, but they always led to conversations with different kinds of people in which I learned more about the world around me and about myself. Whatever the outcome, those connections are worth making.