Making new friends while staying in contact with old friends can be difficult for anybody living in a new area.
Clayonna Bennet, freshman business major, and Stephanie Parente, senior liberal studies major, are both starting new stages in their lives, learning how to keep old friends while studying at school and building friendships with others.
Bennet, living a half-hour away from school, said she visits home almost every other weekend.
She said now that she is in college and away from home her conversations are a little different.
“Before, I wouldn’t always be on the phone with them for a long time, like before when I was home we would probably have short conversations like ‘where you at? Alright I’m ‘bout to come to your house’ or something like that and then we’ll just finish our conversations in person,” Bennet said.
“Now we have to have a whole conversation on the phone about a situation that we might have,” Bennet said.
Sometimes, it might be hard to find time in a busy schedule to talk to friends from home.
“I can’t give them my full attention 24/7. You have a lot of responsibility and sometimes you have to put your work [and] your responsibilities first and that can kinda break up a friendship if they’re not understanding,” Bennet said.
Parente has been in college for four years and is now in her fifth year. She has had a lot of experience with keeping in contact with friends from high school and with those who graduated from Cabrini last year.
“I think the first step is to reach out to the person and find like a common ground, a common interest.” Parente said.
During college, students may gain lasting friendships as well as temporary ones.
“The successful friendships I have are because me and the other person put in like the same amount of effort,” Parente said. “I find that friendships fail when either they’re putting in too much effort and I’m not doing it or I put in too much effort and they’re not.”
Quality is an important aspect of all friendships and when quality is lacking the friendship will also lack.
“I feel like, as you get older the number of friends you have disintegrates but the value of those friendships is a lot greater than the petty friends you had when you started college because now there’s an actual interest in the friendship not just ‘I wanna go out and party with you’ type of friendship,” Parente said.
Cameron Monroe, junior accounting major, has visited home frequently for the past two years but being an RA on campus has changed that.
“It’s hard to maintain a long distance friendship,” Monroe said. “It’s hard to constantly see each other and hang out with each other and it takes a lot of effort when you’re in a long distance friendship to keep those friends around.”
Monroe says that one of his good friends moved to Florida so it is harder to stay in contact. He says, “Our schedules don’t match so we never get to talk to each other… as much as we used to.”
All three students although different ages believe that having and keeping old friends around is very important because they can talk to you about things that new friends can’t.
Parente says to freshman, “Don’t put so much emphasis on how often you talk to somebody. Make the conversations you have meaningful.”
She says, “my advise to seniors is, “to have a sense of balance so although you’re gonna be busy with your full time job and whatever else is going on in life it’s all about that balance and just like I would say to freshman, it’s not about how often you talk to them but when you do see them make the time count.”
