Your task: meet as many strangers as possible, create friendships
Rice University is like summer camp. I’m meeting new people all the time, and they’re all so chipper. Our school seems to place a lot of importance on students getting to know each other, and I appreciate how easy it is to find interesting people.
However, since Rice has so many students, we don’t have that much time to spend with each one. That’s a problem, because some people take longer to get to know than others.
Think about how you might have missed out on the musi who taught you to listen to classical piano differently if circumstance didn’t force you to sit through FWIS together three times a week. Who else might we have missed out on simply because we didn’t stick around long enough for them to make a remark that piqued our interest?
This concerns me, because I don’t connect with a lot of people right away, perhaps because, as a foreigner, I lack common experiences to draw from. It is less of a deficiency on their part or mine than our very human inability to recognize things we’ve never seen, and this is beautiful. It means that, to varying extents, all of us are learning to form new kinds of friendships which inform our perspective of the world.
When we do make new friends, though, we learn from them by indirectly making their experiences our own. And that’s valuable; all too often, we fall into the habit of keeping company with those who are similar to us because it is convenient.
So get to know the boy who talks to homeless people in Hermann Park, or that girl who you always manage to make easy conversation with but don’t see enough of. Make time for them; we can and should take advantage of the community of fascinating people we have yet to understand.
We’ve come to rely on instant connections as a metric for how well we’ll get along with other people, but relationships are founded on openness and commitment. Let’s bin the notion that we find friends and adopt the practice of creating them instead.
More from The Rice Thresher
What we want to see from the new Student Association
After an election marked by last-minute changes and ballot errors, Trevor Tobey has been elected Student Association president and will soon settle into his post alongside the rest of the new executive board.
Condemn DEI censorship, protect campus research
The Office of the Provost announced that Rice’s DEI office will be renamed to the Office of Access and Institutional Excellence on Feb. 28. As a graduate student, I am not privy to the reasons for this rebranding. I hope that, in light of recent federal and state directives and ongoing censorship, it is obvious why I am wary, even if the office claims to continue to promote values of diversity, equity and inclusion while removing these words from its website.
Dismantling subtle racism by reshaping incentives
Before moving to the U.S., I had been cautioned about racism, but I reassured myself: It’s a new generation; people are more conscious. For the most part, I wasn’t wrong. But what no one warned me about was the racism that lingers in the air, unspoken yet deeply felt. It exists in the assumptions people hold, in the way they speak with confidence about other cultures while knowing so little.
Please note All comments are eligible for publication by The Rice Thresher.