Features
Making friends after college
By Chris Takacs ’05
May 15, 2015
It’s fairly easy to make friends in college, generally speaking. Students are thrown into a sea of other people their age, made to live together in cramped buildings for four years. They eat together, go to class together, party together and so on. Helping people make friends is something residential colleges do quite well, though it’s officially just considered a byproduct of the more formal, intellectual goals of higher education.
After college, students are thrown into another sea of people (the inhabitants of the “real world”), and they inevitably find that they aren’t making friends at quite the same rate, or with quite the same ease as in college. Students maintain many of the closest relationships they made at Hamilton, but often do so from a distance. If not across the country or state, then across a city. Between work and (eventually) family life, it gets harder and harder to see college friends with anything close to the regularity of college.
When Professor Dan Chambliss and I studied Hamilton graduates, most agreed: making friends in college came naturally, even for introverts; making friends after college was a lot harder. And many found that the best source of new friends actually came from the Hamilton alumni community itself—people they didn’t know well in college who ended up living near them after graduation. Recent graduates also found that friendships tended to develop from “college-like” activities—volunteer groups, book clubs, church choirs, amateur softball leagues. These are the “extracurriculars” of real life. Friendships from work were also common, but for many graduates these were limited by professionalism and office politics. In other words, friends from work are often just friends at work, and not outside of the office.
And so making friends after college amounts to, in some ways, making life after college more like college itself—participating in the kinds of activities that students do: extracurriculars, volunteering, sports, clubs. Surrounding yourself with people of approximately your age with at least one similar interest (the activity you are sharing), on a regular basis. You will hear graduates often say that college was the best time in their life, and the real world is a lot less fun. But with a little work you can make the real world a bit more like college was.