Freshman year is critical, but not for the reasons most students (and their parents) imagine. American students have the luxury of a long horizon to settle on good classes, select a major and chart a career; there’s plenty of time to make academic mistakes and recover from them. But it’s important to set off on the right foot in one respect: making friends.
At the start of freshman year, there’s a window of opportunity, when customary rules about social interactions are suspended, and when it seems perfectly normal for someone to sit down next to you at lunch or in class and strike up a conversation.
Social inhibitions tend to dissolve when a group of strangers enters a new environment. Think of adults on a cruise, teenagers at a summer camp, or Chaucer’s garrulous pilgrims, chatting and revealing volumes about themselves. The bond is all the more guaranteed when facing a shared hardship — say, the boredom of freshman orientation sessions or the stress of placement exams.
[For more of this story, written by Nicholas A. Christakis, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08...;pgtype=sectionfront]
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