by Michael Skinner

Created on: August 02, 2009   Last Updated: August 21, 2010

College is one of the best times and places in your life to have the kind of bonding experiences that create the deepest friend ships. You are at the height of your physical powers, you have much to learn, and you have a willingness and ability to learn. Moreover, you are surrounded by people who are in that same boat. Now is the time to try bungee jumping and hang gliding and kayaking and riding down a wild river in an inner tube. Go to the student lounge and check out any bulletin boards. Look for opportunities to teach and travel in foreign lands. Any of these experiences are liable to put you together with a few other students with whom you will share experiences and form close relationships. Unless you or your companions are total pant loads, you will make friends this way.

There are of course more mundane ways to meet and make chums in the ivy covered halls of an institution of higher learning. You can, whilst dining on tea sandwiches at the cotillion, opine to Reginald Snotbottom on the dashed and deuced inconvenience of having to train new slaves for your home out in the Hamptons after the last batch died from eating poorly cooked gruel.

Or there are even more mundane activities that can gain you pals at college. Do the opposite of what any good soldier does. Volunteer for everything. And do your volunteer activities in a bright and cheerful manner. Most normal people are attracted to cheerfulness and optimism. Especially if they are strangers in a strange land in search of a friendly face. So volunteer to take out the trash or clean the common rooms or to plant trees.

Find something that interests you like alien abductions, crop circles, cross dressing or differential calculus and obsess about it. Well, to tell the truth, the alien crop circle thing is bound to get you pegged as a low life weirdo and all you will attract is paste eating zombies. Knowing Calculus so well that you what Newton and Leibniz did in their spare time is knowledge than can help you win friends and influence people at college. Volunteer to tutor Calculus or even mentor as a part time job and you will almost certainly make friends with people for whom long division is a mathematical challenge.

The truism that you have to be a blessing to get a blessing was never truer than in college.  Know something that no one else knows or that many people need to know better.  Think of it this way, there is no easier way to meet all the new, cute freshmen girls than to be so very good at first year calculus that you can tutor it.  And it's easy to be that good.  If nothing else,  find all the sophomores you can who already took calculus and ask if you can borrow any exams, notes or old tests that they are just going to throw out anyway.

Learn more about this author, Michael Skinner.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.