Grateful #36 - cold-calling and posters

As May rolls around, countless seniors are trying to wrap their minds around what it will be like when they go to college.  They’re scared, they’re excited, and they’re ready for that next big adventure they’ve being hearing about since they first started going to school.  In every single conversation I’ve had with them, I try to give them that extra boost of confidence that yes, they will make friends and no, they will not be sitting alone on a Friday night.  More worried about the social aspect than the academic aspect, these seniors are realizing that the built in group of friends they’ve had for years is suddenly going to go disperse, and they will be left to try to create other meaningful friendships that do not originate from something they had in common in the 2^nd grade, or from bonding over the time they got in trouble for laughing at the teacher in their freshman English class. 

Today, one of my students was lamenting about the possibility of getting stuck with horrible roommates.  I pointed out that she will probably get the names and numbers of her roommates ahead of time, which means she’ll get a chance to talk to them before she’s thrown in a room with them for a year.  And then I remembered getting the name and number of my first college roommate, Ellen.  Before the days of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, (and kind of right on the cusp of when email was used as a means of correspondence) my only choice was to call her.  On a land line.  I don’t really even remember the conversation; we probably discussed our majors, our hobbies, our boyfriend struggles, and the color of our comforters.   Bigger than all of those get-to-know-you questions, we went into the conversation WANTING to like each other.  And when we finally met in person in room 1311 of the East Tower, we instantly clicked.   

And then I thought about how current high school seniors will get to know their new roommates before they meet them. 

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. 

A very likely scenario:   Students are given the names and email addresses of  their future roommates.  A student will find her future roommate on facebook and begin to scroll through all of the future roommate’s pictures and judge her based on her clothes, her hair, what her friends look like, how many selfies she takes, and what her favorite bands are.   The senior will definitely compare herself to her future roommate, worry that her future roommate is prettier than she is, make up a story in her head about how her future roommate steals her friends and her love interest, and then have already decided that she hates her future roommate - before she has even seen or spoken to her. 

I wish it wasn’t that way – for as much as I use and love social media, it has it’s downfalls.  Pre-judgment will undoubtedly be the downfall that causes future college roommates to have to work really hard to be liked.

Besides, we tend to put things on our facebook pages that we want the world to see.  We only give a snipit of ourselves to the world, and it's usually the prettiest days, the happiest occasions, and the things that make us look good - we never upload photos of what we look like when we're feeling insecure, we never broadcast to the world how much we've been hurt by someone we cared about,  and we don't brag about our mistakes and our errors.   Our portraits on social media have few flaws; our reality is often quite the opposite.   

 I'm grateful for a poster that hangs on one of the classrooms  across from mine.   It says, "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."  I think we forget that.  I think we forget that behind the Macbook Pro screen protectors, and all the URLs and the prom photos and pictures of our families and the posts about our best 5k time and checking in at our favorite restaurant- we are all fighting hard battles.    Human kindness, as my friend Melissa told me about her years of living abroad, is the one thing that all people, regardless of place in the world, have in common.  Tweet that.