Casting A
WIDE Social Net
Finding Strength in Peripheral Friendships By Jenna LaConte / Editor-in-Chief
At Boston College, eight is the magic number. It is the guiding force in the formation of freshman-year friendships, haunting students from the first introductions during Welcome Week all the way through the housing selection process. But let’s face it. As socially desirable as an eight-man may be, the odds of coincidentally locking down seven same-sex best friends in the first semester of college are low. Instead, freshmen scramble to piece the puzzle together, forcing certain friendships into place solely to attain that magical eight. By the time sophomore year rolls around, most of the class’s social energy has been entirely burned through by this painstaking process. Having committed to sharing a room code with seven other individuals, the hardest part of making friends in college comes to a welcome end. No more sizing up every new acquaintance for his potential as a suitemate, no more dreading telling that girl down the hall that she did not make the final cut. This is not to say that
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BC Gavel
people cut themselves off entirely to new friends after freshman year, but rather that the process becomes increasingly passive. Relationships form mostly out of convenience between people who live on the same floor, who participate in the same activities, whose friends are dating one another’s friends. The days of awkward introductions between strangers during those first few weeks of school are long forgotten, replaced by the comfort of a familiar group of friends
to come home to each day. As tempting as it can be to center our whole social lives on our roommates, the value of casting a wide social net is highly underrated on this campus. To clarify, casting a wide social net is not the same thing as networking (making as many friends as possible in college for the sake of making as many friends as possible in college), nor is it the same as social climbing (forging friendships in order to appear “popular” by association). On the contrary, networking and social climbing are surefire ways to leave college with as few authentic relationships as humanly possible. Casting a wide social net involves being open to forming new friendships at all times, whether or not those friendships come with the benefits of a desirably-sized friend group or increased connections on campus. Casting a wide social net is as simple— and as complicated—as treating every week like Welcome Week by introducing
April 2014