How to Meet Your Best Friends
By DASH I.
College is an amazing time to find best friends because there’s more time to spend with them in college than any other stage of life. I am lucky to be part of a tight knit friend group, with whom I spend hours every single day. I met many of them in fairly typical ways, but it all started with one unlikely moment. While your story will differ greatly from mine, there is one key lesson we can all learn.
I met Jake, one of my now best friends at convocation. I honestly wanted to skip it, waking up to sit in 90+ degree heat in a black robe didn’t sound like a great deal of fun to me, but with some prodding from my older sister, I went nonetheless. Thank goodness I did, because out of the thousands in attendance, I ended up sitting next to a guy who, just like me, was planning to study sports journalism. We got to talking about USC athletics and found that USC was going to play UCLA on our birthday–yes you read that right–coincidentally we shared the exact same birthday! We hit it off quickly, and talked throughout much of the ceremony, finding a freakish amount of things we had in common. If I hadn’t attended convocation, I imagine my semester would have gone entirely different.
Jake introduced me to Liam, a friend he met on Instagram before arriving at school. The three of us decided to go to a Welcome Week Carnival together, where we ended up running around and laughing for hours on end. From that moment on, we became an inseparable trio, which in many ways was amazing, but it also limited us in terms of meeting other people. It wasn’t until we decided we needed to find some more people to build a intramural flag football team that we found the rest of our group.
Jake’s neighbors–Simon, Sean, and David–who he didn’t know all that well, were interested in joining our team. Similarly to Jake, Liam, and I, they had been a trio for most of the semester, making the beginning of the season a little awkward. We all got along, but both trios remained fairly separate until one day Simon and I pitched the idea that we all live in a 6 person on-campus apartment our Sophomore year. Without even knowing one another all that well, everyone surprisingly agreed, and for some reason from that moment on both groups merged seamlessly into one.
Every student here has a different story on how they met their closest friends, and you will too. The point is, even when something may feel dumb, meeting people takes being willing say yes. I said yes to convocation and the carnival; Simon, Sean, and David said yes to joining a random flag football team; and we all said yes to living with one another. If you remember one thing I write, let it be this, SAY YES.
