When I came to William Jewell College, I had meticulously spelled out a four-year plan. The end result of this four-year plan was what I envisioned to be the culmination of the ideal me: I would have earned a bachelor’s degree in history and would be on track to going to some Ivy league institution to start a master’s program. 

I felt that this desire of mine to have a degree in history, which I had loved to study throughout my four years in high school, was an utterly fundamental desire. My whole being was filtered through this desire. I could not have been described without reference to my love of history. Thus, I was fervently convinced that I had settled into a fixed pattern of being, into a kind of irrevocable character. I was very much mistaken. 

My so-called irrevocable character was already crumbling with a few phone conversations with the senior tutor of Oxbridge, Dr. Kenneth Alpern. The summer before I committed to going to Jewell, I was discussing my ideas on the nature of trust and love. I did not understand the kind of analysis I was doing in my conversations, but I found that I was growing increasingly fascinated with conceptual analysis. In other words, without knowing it, I was discovering that what I was truly passionate about was philosophy, not history. 

Throughout the entirety of my high school career, I had often been frustrated at the fact that history would not delve into the minds of the people we studied. I thought that to engage with the individual – with the structure of that individual, taking into consideration their motivations, their desires, their feelings – history could potentially arrive at some kind of account on the nature of human beings. 

I described the kind of history I wanted to study as a deeply individualistic account of history, with the agent as the source of historical change, but nonetheless the agent was embedded in a kind of historically determined context. Such an account was necessarily confused and conflicting – I was torn by a desire to analyze a kind of underlying structure I perceived in historical events and in people, but I had no words to describe what I really wanted to study. 

When I communicated my conception of the kind of history I wanted to study, people suggested that I study psychology instead. I would grow irate. There was something in the very nature of the kind of human experience, historical and not historical, which was important. My conversations with Alpern that summer further convinced me that he implicitly understood the kinds of inquiry I wanted to undertake. When he suggested that I take an ethics course, I initially felt a sense of confusion. Had I not told him that I wanted to study history? Why did he insist on my taking ethics, of all things? I hardly knew what the course entailed. Nevertheless, I had come to trust Alpern, for I perceived him as the sort of individual who knew what was what. So, I agreed to take ethics. 

The next couple of weeks saw me in the thick of philosophical analysis. I woke up in the mornings to discuss coherentism, noncognitivism, and deontology in ethics. I would then go to my responsible self class, and my professor was Dr. Elizabeth Sperry, the department chair for philosophy. I would go to Oxbridge introductory seminar and pit Plato and Mill together. I was ecstatic. I knew that in all my conversations in all of these classes, I was delving into what it was that made life worth living, what made life good. Things made sense now – before, I had been trying to dig underneath historical concepts without having any understanding of what it was I was digging for. Here it was! What I wanted more than anything was to study philosophy, not history. 

But I felt enormously guilty as soon as I began to realize that my love of history was a rather misplaced love. In high school, I was the history student. I had made a commitment, through my words, through my actions, through my feelings, to my history professors to the field of history. If I gave up what I once would have called my undying love for history, would I be giving up who I was? Would I lose my essence? 

Eventually, my love of philosophy trumped my feelings of inconsistency and identity-confusion. After all, wasn’t I in college? I was supposed to change, and I was not obligated to be a particular way. Nobody could be upset that I was choosing what I really wanted. In fact, if I did not change my major to philosophy, I would be making myself miserable, and what for? Because I was moved by the past merely because I had once been habituated in such a way, and thought that somehow justified a kind of needless suffering? Just because I was becoming an essentially different person, did not mean that I was being somehow less true to myself or that I was going down the wrong path. If anything, my self is in a constant state of reinvention – as I interact with other people and other disciplines, I come to conceive of myself differently, and I reconstruct who I am successively. 

In switching my major to History of Ideas, I was moving away from adhering to the past, to custom, merely for custom’s sake. Instead, I was beginning to critically reflect on the kinds of things which I had once valued, and asking myself whether or not I thought that these were the kinds of things which I wanted to value. I was redefining what exactly a good life would look like for me and the ways in which I might reorient my psychic dispositions and my circumstances such that I could achieve my new ideal. In my conscientious reflection, I was becoming more me. That ended my predicament. 

What I mean to communicate to you, dear reader, is that you are bound to change in college. As I write now, I am still in the process of changing. And that is perfectly okay. Human beings are not these rigid things that refuse to respond to change. Rather, we are dynamic. It is okay to think that you will be one way, and then the next moment feel as though you are something different. So long as you are engaging in critical, but constructive, self-reflection that seeks to reach a better understanding of the self and the good life for the self, then you are doing a great job. You are meant to change. It is not a crime. You do not have to feel guilty for changing majors, for breaking up with a romantic partner or for choosing different friends. College is a time of transition – don’t make the transition harder than it needs to be by torturing yourself unnecessarily. 

Before I begin talking about friendship, I would like to give a disclaimer. My experiences, and the experiences of the people I have interviewed, are not universal. These reflections on how friendships change do not necessarily relate to how everyone else’s friendships change – though perhaps my general comments and the interviews I’ve conducted will help you, dear reader, understand the nature of your changing friendships.

I have interviewed people to find out about three different kinds of friends – high school friends, college friends and roommates. The interviews provide a characterization of the different kinds of friendships that we can use to compare the friendships to each other.

Before getting into this characterization of friendship, I want to make some comments concerning the nature of college, for understanding the nature of college will help us understand how it is that college itself affects friendships.

College is an intense time for all of us. The change from living in your hometown with your family to moving to a totally new environment without – or with very little – familial support can be very stressful. Furthermore, we also have to adjust to a change in workload. But one of the biggest changes is your friend group. You go from being in a group of teenagers trying to find their stride in their formative years to being a young adult creating the building blocks of your life. The connections you make in college can feel very different from the ones in high school.

I first decided to approach a high school friend and ask her about her opinions on high school friendships. She described high school friends as those that she sits and “has lunch with.” She also says hi to those friends in the hallway and engages in some pleasant small talk with them.
When asked about how her friendships in high school had changed, my friend said that she does not really talk to them anymore. She said, “Instagram is enough to know about each other’s lives.”

From my friend’s statements, it seemed to me as though most people don’t have a special connection with their high school friends. However, when I compare these statements with my experiences of friendship in college, it becomes clear to me that I am closer to my college friends and that I have a more meaningful experience with my friends in college. I don’t fully understand why, but I think part of it has to do with the amount of time that I spend with my college friends, as opposed to my high school friends.

For example, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I have a biology class with my friends in it. That class meets for an hour each day, which means that I see my friends automatically for at least three hours a week, every week. Usually, my friends and I decide to work together to make sure that our homework is as accurate as possible, which means that I spend another three hours per week with my friends. This amounts to six hours total per week of contact with my friends.

Furthermore, if an individual has labs with a particular friend or other classes with that friend or if you just want to hang out with your friends on the weekends, then that bumps up the amount of time spent together anywhere from nine hours to 18 hours a week. If I had a boyfriend, I don’t think I would even spend that much time with him!

And what if your college friend happens to be your roommate? That means you probably see them around eight hours a day, or 74 hours a week. Your roommate might as well become your family.

I imagine that this seems like a huge amount of time to spend with your college friends. But, surprisingly, I never feel sick of them. I don’t want to sound cheesy, but I love every moment I have with them, and I think it’s worth my time to hang out with them – time is so expensive in college, I never get enough sleep.

Furthermore, I think that the structure of college classes is better because it gives people more opportunities to bond with each other. I think it’s so exciting to talk with a friend about what you just learned in class, and both of you can discuss these ideas to reach a better, shared understanding. I promise that when this happens, you will love class more because you understand what is going on a lot better. Or, it may be that the class sucks, and you can always trash it with your friend. Your friend wouldn’t mind. They probably hate it too. That’s why you’re friends!

In terms of roommates – it seems as though one spends a whole lot of time with one’s roommate. Even though not everyone feels the same way about their roommate, I think that my roommate and I will be friends forever. We all know that it can be really frustrating to live with a new person. However, my roommate and I chose to put all of the bad things aside, and not waste time fighting that we could be laughing together instead.

I think college friendships have introduced me to a new mindset: if you have a chance to get that close to a person, use it because you never know how lucky you are until it’s too late. Developing the ability to deal with conflict with your roommate and avoid spiraling into angry screaming fights will be useful for all your future relationships, romantic or not.

I’ll always remember this one day when I was walking back to the room, and when I opened the door to the dorm, my roommate said to me: “Oh my God, you know what’s crazy? You know when you can recognize your parents’ footsteps? I can recognize yours!”

The crazy part is that she has been living with me for only three weeks.

I’m sure that everyone thinks that college friendships are going to be defined by an insane amount of partying, or at least, by one party every weekend. While it is true that parties can definitely be part of the college friendship experience, this is definitely not the highlight of college friendships.

In college, you’ll spend your days guzzling excessive amounts of coffee and writing three essays a week. So your college friendships are likely going to reflect the need to maintain an academic schedule, and to maintain it sanely. College friends, then, are like little angels that help you get through everything difficult in college, which is what differentiates from the more superficial high school friend. Going through conflict strengthens friendships, trust me.