“The biggest lesson for me was to take it slow. There’s no need to friend half the freshman class online before you show up to school. I knew many people who were ‘friends’ with hundreds of students before they stepped on campus. Meet people in person and friend those that you like and trust. This is how true friendships are built. There was a time that people made friends before Facebook.”
Sophomore, Middlebury College
“I wish I was more of my own person. My freshman year I tried to be the person that everyone liked and, for the most part, it worked. I had accumulated 500 Facebook friends in one year. The problem was they were just Facebook friends. I didn’t have any real connections because I knew so many people superficially. The deep connections are the ones that count. I was so envious of the people I knew that had a group of 3 or 4 really close friends. Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Take time and build friendships.”
Rebecca, St. Louis University
From the Busted Halo Braintrust…
The Sad but True Story of sweetsexymilk
Take some time to read over your profile, does it accurately reflect the person you are now? If you’re not happy with it, take it down, change it or protect it. It’s not about being paranoid, just about keeping yourself emotionally safe and having the choice to reveal only the things YOU choose to reveal to all these new people in your life.
Does it accurately reflect who you want to be? Often times you will now be facebook friends with people at college before you meet them, and certainly before you get to know them well, so make sure that the person you’re presenting yourself as on facebook is really the way you want people to think of you freshman year.
sweetsexymilk (based on one BH staffer’s experience)
“One girl, who happened to have a large chest, was going through summer freshman orientation. At orientation when people were exchanging IM Screen names, she gave out her screen name, which was unfortunately (although obviously by choice) sweetsexymilk. Before she even got to college all of the freshman and most of the upperclassmen knew about sweetsexymilk, so for the first week when people met her they laughed and thought of her more as a novelty than a person. It colored everyone’s opinions of her, before she got a chance to meet them.”