One thing most people are usually quite excited about when they leave high school and start their college experience is leaving all the drama at home and starting fresh with all new people.
Then they go to a big school and are like, “Yes! Everywhere I turn no one cares about what I did yesterday!”…until they all do.
Your university is really only so big. But that takes some people a while to figure out, even though Kevin Bacon knew it from the start with his Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, based off of the small world syndrome of six degrees of separation. That means everyone is connected in at least six ways. But look at me, I’m a senior and I just started to realize this towards the end of last year.
College is a little bubble of a community, if you think about it. There are only so many places that everyone at the same school can go, so you start seeing the same people over and over again.
In your major, as your education increases your class size decreases, and next thing you know your Communications classmates and you are BFF’s and scheduling trips to go apple picking together.
Then you join extracurriculars and you find out that the closely knit dance club is just like a sorority when it comes to drama. Who likes this girl’s boyfriend, and who wants to beat that girl up… common nonsense.
Pick anybody you know, then think about how many different connections they have to you. I can be perfectly honest when I tell you that there is not only one way you are connected to any given person. Everybody at your school is connected. Everybody – and that is not an exaggeration.
One person that I’ve recently met (never seen before, never heard of either) and I have 22 mutual friends on Facebook. Not one or two, but 22. Besides that, I saw her out with a someone else I knew from an extracurricular and guess what? They happen to be roommates. The girl was not one of the 22 mutual friends.
If you want your actions and behaviors to be kept quiet and personal, guess what, they never will! People know your business the same way they did in high school; the way that made you want to scream and run from your hometown.
But in college, also just like high school, you know everyone else’s business too. For example, I live on a nice little dead end, where my roommate and I sat down and figured out how many of our 18 townhouses are connected via relationships (good and bad) and drama. We came up with about 10. And most often, that’s just from what we see and overhear, not from what we’re told.
What I’m getting at is 14,000 people is really just a number. As a freshman, it’s a big and scary number. As a senior, please make that number bigger by at least another five thousand.
People come out of the woodwork, but you realize they were never really in it. And neither were you, no matter what you think. It’s a big school with a small community reputation. Everybody knows everybody in one way or another.
So be careful about what you say and do, because guaranteed you’re not the only one who knows you’ve said or done it!
