In the season finale, sociologist Janice McCabe offers insights on friendship from her new book Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends, as this fall's entering class makes the transition from home to college. "Belonging is a powerful human need," Professor McCabe notes, and the post-admission period leading up to orientation and the start of classes is what McCabe calls "the initial friendship market." An expert in how people connect in social situations, she advises students to "be intentional about what, who, and where you look" for friends during this fast-moving moment, a powerful transition when everyone is eager to make new friendships.
In the season finale, sociologist Janice McCabe offers insights on friendship from her new book Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends, as this fall's entering class makes the transition from home to college. "Belonging is a powerful human need," Professor McCabe notes, and the post-admission period leading up to orientation and the start of classes is what McCabe calls "the initial friendship market." An expert in how people connect in social situations, she advises students to "be intentional about what, who, and where you look" for friends during this fast-moving moment, a powerful transition when everyone is eager to make new friendships.
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid, and this is part two of the season finale of Admissions Beat.
Part of the story of going to college is this mythology that college is the best time in your life and that the friends you make in college are your lifelong pals. And that's often true. But I think in this transition period, as students wrap up high school and start to look forward, there's a lot of expectations put on themselves and their peers to live up to that myth that college is the best time of your life.
So this week, as we wrap up season nine, I've invited Dartmouth Professor Janice McCabe to join us to share some thoughts about friendship based on her research as a sociologist. So when we come back, we will say hello to Janice and have a conversation about the friendship networks that develop during these transitions from one moment in one's life to the next. So we'll be right back.
(music)
Hello, Janice.
Janice McCabe:
Hi, great to be here with you.
Lee Coffin:
Thank you. It's so lovely to have you as my guest. T0 listeners, Janice McCabe is associate professor of sociology at Dartmouth, and she is the author of two books, Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends and Connecting in College. And in a recent New York Times guest essay, she referred herself as a sociologist who studies how people connect. So Janice, is it fair to call you an expert in friendship?
Janice McCabe:
I guess so.
Lee Coffin:
Tell us about how that interest started.
Janice McCabe:
Yeah, for me, it started in college. I was an undergraduate at Tulane University, and by chance I was just there at the end of last week giving a talk about my book and speaking to students in the broader Tulane community. But my interest came out of my own experiences in a women's studies class actually, and realizing that none of the other women in that class had the strong friendships that we expected with other women by our senior year. And I started puzzling about that a bit and have researched it in a range of ways since then.
Lee Coffin:
And you've been on the faculty at Dartmouth for how long?
Janice McCabe:
I think 14 years.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. So now you've got a perfect seat to watch students come into the student body and move through the curriculum, but you're also one of Dartmouth's house professors. And to the listeners, Dartmouth has a residential life program known as house communities where a member of the faculty leads a set of residence halls and students from first year to seniors who live and learn under that organizational structure. So as a house professor, I would guess that that's also a really interesting test kitchen for all the things you study.
Janice McCabe:
Oh, for sure. It was one of the things that drew me to the job as house professor was being able to see these processes in action and facilitate connections that students have with each other and with the faculty, staff, graduate students who are also part of the house communities.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Take us to September every year when the class arrives and the parents, guardian supporters drop them off, and there's always an emotional teary moment at that goodbye. But what do you witness as the first year class takes its seat and starts to scope each other out?
Janice McCabe:
There's so much excitement. There's so many expectations that students bring to that moment. One student that stuck with me told me it was both urgent and terrifying to make friends in that period.
Lee Coffin:
Wow.
Janice McCabe:
And I think that that captures that there's so much emotion and people do make friends often quickly too, because of that sense of it being urgent to make those connections and terrifying. And there are so many emotions because students are also feeling loneliness during that period at the same time that they're feeling so much excitement and connection. And they're also feeling often a tremendous sense of social comparison to the friends that they left behind, what they see on social media, both friends from afar and peers down the hall. It often feels like everyone's having more fun than they are. Everyone's having more friends than they are too.
Lee Coffin:
So you've just set a banquet of topics. I'm imagining a parent listening to this with maybe an oldest child saying, "Oh boy, I hadn't really dialed into any of that. I thought we were done. Daughter has made her enrollment decision on May 1st.” Admissions seems like it's in the rearview mirror. And as these two episodes have illustrated, there's still things to think about. And I wanted to put up a spotlight on this one, the expectations that come around this transition.
You wrote in the New York Times about friendship markets, which I want to come back to because I think it's a really interesting concept as we think about these transitions. But you wrote, "In a thriving friendship market, a majority of people in a particular setting are interested in buying or selling friendship." For example, middle schoolers merging into a new high school or first year students arriving at college, new connections abound."
And I never thought of it that way, but as people leave eighth grade and arrive in ninth grade, whether it's the local public high school, independent school, a boarding school, all the students who are about to arrive in college in the fall have done that, but they were younger. And now they're doing the same thing. They're leaving home and finding themselves in a peer group where they're all high-flyers.
This pod focuses on selective admissions. And one of the truths about selective admissions is you found a peer group where you were all big person on campus, you were all near the top of your class, you're good kids who've done well and poof, you've now got a community filled with that profile. And is that what contributes to the loneliness? Is that it's just finding your way through this new crowd or is it just human nature that you look backwards at where you were and you wonder where you are?
Janice McCabe:
Yeah, I mean, it's complicated because there's so many potential friends on campus. There's no other time in people's lives that they're surrounded by so many potential friends, and yet finding your people can be challenging too. And sometimes just the sense that there are so many options is hard, and other times people can feel anxious and grab onto the first people that come about. And we can talk about the challenges in that with the initial friendship market too, because it's tempting, and yet I encourage people to stay open.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So Janice, define the initial friendship market, because in your book, that's a recurring theme that there are these moments, and I think the transition to college is a big one, where there's a marketplace of people looking for their people.
Janice McCabe:
Yeah. So I borrow this term “friendship market” from another book by sociologists, Lee Cuba and colleagues, and they wrote a book called Practice for Life, about how college is practice for life after college. And they have one chapter on connection and a little paragraph where they talk about this idea of the friendship market that I was really intrigued about as I was doing these interviews for Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends, which focuses on three different campuses. And I saw the different ways that friendships formed yet some similarities on these campuses.
And so the thinking about timing, when it happens and where it happens, I refine that into thinking about initial friendship markets and secondary friendship markets. So initial friendship markets is this period that we've been talking about, the first few weeks of students transition into campus or anytime a new cohort of people comes together. And it's this initial friendship market because nearly everyone is open to making friends. Some people don't like the buyers and sellers. It makes it seem transactional. You could think about it as trading or openness.
That openness is what's really important because if you're the only person who's looking for friends, then it's not a market. That's part of why it's so hard or so much harder to make friends later in life because you may move to a new city or start a new job and you're looking for friends, but other people aren't in the market. There's not a marketplace in that way.
Lee Coffin:
But during orientation, those first days on any campus, there's this intense moment of introduction.
Janice McCabe:
Yeah, that's right. And it's both the people that are there and their expectations, and then colleges, the selective institutions that you're talking about, they have a lot of programming that are also geared towards magnifying the effects of the initial friendship market, bringing people together. Related to that, our sociologists and social scientists find two main drivers of friendship, what we call propinquity or proximity. So those ideas of encountering the same person over and over.
So if you think about a freshman dorm, for example, students are ... I heard so many stories of students making friends while waiting in line to get their key at their freshman dorm. Or maybe they'd start up a conversation there and then they'd see each other in the hallway later on, or in the shared bathroom, or as they're walking from the dorm to class because their paths are crossing in those ways, and sociologists study structure and often those structures are invisible, but that's part of that propinquity of that.
Lee Coffin:
They're invisible, but they're real. I mean, you've just described very practical moments in the arrival on any campus. You got to pick up a key. You have to get your ID. You have to go sit for a French placement exam. I mean, you have these recurring little tiny episodes.
Janice McCabe:
Yeah, that's right. And other things, just seeing someone in one of those settings and then you walk by a lounge in your dorm and they're sitting there, there's a moment where you can possibly connect too or deepen that connection.
Lee Coffin:
So that was type one. What's the second type?
Janice McCabe:
Yeah, so the second driver of friendship is what's called homophily, or similarities. So there can be interest-based homophily and identity-based homophily, and there can be some overlap there. But thinking about the initial friendship market, if you're a varsity athlete, for example, particularly playing a fall sport, you may come onto campus early and you're connecting with other people who are either playing your sport or maybe just with other athletes too on that similarity, and that's something that can bond you.
Lee Coffin:
It's so interesting. And for listeners, if you think about high school and your friendships there, where did they originate? If I think about my own high school friends, they came from really three places, maybe four, drama club, which was my passion, the newspaper, which was also my passion, the students who were in the honors track with me because we were a small group at a big public high school and we were in each other's classes over, and over, and over again from ninth grade all the way to 12th.
And the fourth one, because I was in a public school, some of them were from my neighborhood. I knew them since I was seven. We went to elementary school, and then middle school, and then high school. And so the proximity to my neighbors created friendships that carried me through. So those same things are true in college. They're just a change. The propinquity of neighborhood might be your dorm. Pre-major cluster could be your academic interests, and the clubs you join are going to be places where you find like-minded people, right?
Janice McCabe:
That's right. And the clubs are likely, it's a mix of homophily and propinquity too, because you're meeting regularly also. So it gives you an opportunity to not just, again, leave it up to chance that you find each other, but you're meeting and getting together on a regular basis.
Lee Coffin:
And you also write about the speed of the initial friendship market. Why is it quick? And what's the danger of speed?
Janice McCabe:
Yeah. Yeah. So as students are coming to campus for orientation, and sometimes ties even start before that, that's a separate conversation that we can have. But as students are coming to campus, whether just for the start of class, or if there's orientation or pre-orientation program that's right at the beginning of class, that's when there's, again, this drive to form friendships. And people often when they find a group, whether in their dorm, in their orientation group, in a club, in an organization, they often let out a sigh like, oh, I found my group, I'm good.
And during that first couple of weeks, there's not an exact moment when the initial friendship market closes until you just notice that people's friendships are a little more stable too. But there's so much movement and opportunity to be able to make new connections. And then after that timing, things close off a bit. People get a little more set. And then campuses differ in the strength of what I call the secondary friendship market, which are these pop-up times later on. If there's a club fair, for example, that might be a time that that happens, or when students are studying abroad, or if the campus has Greek organizations whenever Rush happens, whether that happens in the second, in the spring term, or the second year, or things like that, there are these opportunities that come up again.
But what can happen, back to the initial friendship market with friendships forming quickly, is that just because they're the first people that you meet doesn't mean that they're the best fit for you, that they're going to be meaningful and supportive friendships that are going to fulfill you. And not that you should dump the first friends that you make, but instead just keeping yourself open. You can have a lot of new ties in that time to explore and figure out because as you're going to campus as a student, you're figuring out who you are and how you fit into that also. And so there's just a lot of changes and flexibility that happens.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Switch for a second to your role as a residential faculty member. So uniquely, you live with them. I mean, they're in your house, you're an advisor, you're a mentor, you're present. What do you see?
Janice McCabe:
So friendship isn't just a one-time thing for any of us. We're constantly making new friends. And I think that's something that college students underestimate too. I don't remember the exact number from my research or others, but it's maybe 30% of friends last, maybe less than that, throughout college. There's a lot of change, and there can also be a stigma to losing friends. It doesn't feel good to not be chosen or we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings in that way. Yet it's really natural that friendships both break up and fade away. Those are the two things that I talk about. Sometimes there's a dramatic breakup, but more often it's just a fade away that happens when propinquity is no longer bringing people together. You have to really make an intention in order to keep that friendship.
Lee Coffin:
That's so interesting. And it made me think about high school friends and how they start to fade away once college begins. And yet, in the contemporary moment where there's a phone that lets everybody stay connected, I mean, I've seen a lot of people in the first semester term, I see them connecting to their high school friends and not letting go of that. And I wonder if you have any thoughts or advice to incoming students about that itch to retreat to what's known.
Janice McCabe:
People have space for multiple friendship groups and multiple friends, so not thinking of it as an either/or. There are different ways you can stay connected with your friends, your existing friends while still leaving space to make new ones. That's what I would encourage people to do.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, because I think it's tricky. I've seen enough relatives and children of friends go through this where the parent will say to me, "They're still texting every day with the high school cohort." And I do think that fades. I think that there might be an initial almost digital security blanket where that connection makes you feel better as this intense initial friendship market swirls around you. It makes me anxious just talking about it. I mean, as a dean, I'm thinking about this and I've just not really pondered it before, but it's very vivid.
Janice, can we talk a little bit about online? I mean, we touched it a second ago. What I've noticed over the course of my career from the '90s to now, for parents, if you went to college, orientation typically started in late summer when you got to campus and you had a week or so of programming that the college sponsored and you met your roommate and you maybe wrote a letter, had a phone call with that person, but the in person engagement began right as school started.
What I've seen in the last 15 years since Facebook became a social media platform is the minute we admit people, they join groups, whether it's Facebook or more commonly now, I think they're on Instagram. I will confess, I don't know if TikTok has groups, but these platforms allow admitted students to congregate in these digital spaces and "Get to know each other." So the orientation, the friend building started a month ago. Is that comforting or worrisome?
Janice McCabe:
Maybe both.
Lee Coffin:
Maybe both.
Janice McCabe:
Yeah, because I think it can ease the sense of belonging is a core need that people have, is this need to belong. And so people can fulfill it in different ways. And part of that is the getting to know people even through social media ahead of time, yet people's social media self is often a certain version of themselves, the best version that they hope to present. And people are often connecting based on similarities back to homophily, based on often pretty superficial similarities. And I think the magic of college is getting to know people who are very unlike yourself also. And that's a lot harder when you're meeting people online.
Lee Coffin:
No, that's right. I have always worked at a place that brings a very heterogeneous collection of individuals to the class. And to me, that's why you come to these places because you're stretching outside of your familiarity. And the temptation though in these online groups is to find your people, but they're digital people. We had open house a couple weeks ago, and I overheard someone saying to someone else, "Oh, are you Jake?" And there was an awareness of these newly accepted students to each other. And that's different. To parents, it's something we did not experience in the pre-digital social space we had. And you should just be aware of that, not as a bad thing, but as a thing, that there's some friendship marketing going on via the phones and the thumbs.
Janice McCabe:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I heard that too. A student told me that they were recognized on the green by someone they hadn't met because they had seen their profile or knew each other through online.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Yeah. So let's go one step farther. So people are meeting each other online. I think sometimes there's a temptation from those online introductions to say, "Hey, let's be roommates." Because I think as students look forward, the dorm, the residence hall, the house, whatever it's called on a campus, is ground zero for friendship, I think. I mean, a classroom is too, but that takes a little longer because it's not as open as where you live, and sleep, and play. I caution students to let the residential life staff pair them with a roommate. There's an expertise there about identifying the traits that make two or three people compatible, but there's an itch to pair off like it's Noah's Ark and say, "Hey, be my friend, be my roommate." What thoughts on that?
Janice McCabe:
Yeah, I agree with you 100% there in terms of when students have a choice between having a roommate assigned for them or chosen; they often feel like they should choose themselves, because you don't want to go into a place and be the one who doesn't have it figured out. Yet I saw so many times that those roommate situations didn't work out because people were choosing based on, oh, we both play lacrosse, let's be roommates, which doesn't always lead to good roommate experiences too.
And instead, letting the college assign, as you mentioned, they know the things that make people compatible. You're likely to meet someone that you wouldn't have met otherwise also, which can be really fantastic. You don't actually need to be best friends with your roommate. You need to be able to get along and live together. But I find so many people that I interviewed talked about how they knew that it may not work out in that way, but they really hoped that it would, and then they were disappointed. And sometimes it does work out in that way, but it's not always easy to live with your friends.
Lee Coffin:
Share some thoughts on compatibility. It's such an abstract thing, but I think it's really important.
Janice McCabe:
In terms of friendship compatibility or ...
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, and living together. I mean, it's maybe a different version of sociology, but you're in a room, you're on a hall, you're in a building that's a series of little Russian dolls, like stacked within it. You have community, community, community, and then the big one. But in your room, finding a person who can be a roommate requires a set of traits. And for anyone that's about to fill out the housing form, I mean, give some advice to graduating seniors, pre-matriculant college students about that. What should they be thinking about? Almost existentially, who am I as I'm telling the college, what are my traits that will help them pair me with someone I can live with?
Janice McCabe:
Yeah. I thinking about how you really act and behave versus how you would like to will help also in doing that. I wasn't looking at this exactly in my research, but I certainly heard stories of what worked well and what didn't. Being able to communicate clearly with someone is a really important factor. And it's often something that people find really challenging too.
When students as house professor come to me with roommate problems, I've learned that my first question to them after I listen to them talk a little bit is, "Have you talked to your roommate about that?" And most often it's not. So just being willing to, if you're feeling bad about something, having a hard conversation about it. And often those are about use of the room in terms of when are you studying versus when ... And does it need to be quiet or can it be loud? How clean or messy are you and can you tolerate through that experience? How much can other people be in the room too? Those are the common issues that cause problems for students.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. That housing intake form is really important. I remember filling mine out and as the oldest of five kids, I thought, "I can live with anybody." And I wrote that. I said, "I can live with anybody." So I think the housing people probably collapsed and said, "Great, stick him wherever." And my roommate and I could not have been more incompatible. It made for a bumpy first year because he was slovenly where I was tidy. He was fond of putting marijuana in all sorts of nooks and crannies, including my dental floss container. He didn't go to sleep until 4:00 in the morning, and I just hadn't thought about that. I had opened myself to a mismatch because I wasn't thinking about what I needed both for a roommate, but also as a potential friend.
Janice McCabe:
That can also be hard because many people have their own room at home also, and then they're moving towards sharing a room with one or two other people.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. On the friend making, you write in the book, "Be intentional about what, who, and where you look." What do you mean?
Janice McCabe:
So often people are making friends in the initial friendship market just wherever people are crossing paths and we make a friend, we start talking with someone, and we're just like, "Oh, that's great." Versus at some point it's helpful to step back, reflect a little bit, and take stock. What are the friendships that feel meaningful to me? Which friends fulfill different parts of me in terms of different interests? And we don't need one person to do all of those things for us. I think people are often thinking about a best friend, which I do focus on in my research, but as a network researcher, I also focus on and map these broader networks that people have.
And thinking about, our culture tends to romanticize what I call tight-knitters. People who have one group of friends, most TV shows, most movies of college or just of people in general shows people who have this one group that they do everything together. And the students that I talked to were often comparing themselves to that. I mean, during the interview, I even had a couple people who apologized to me as a researcher because they didn't have that group-
Lee Coffin:
Wow.
Janice McCabe:
... which strikes me as, oh, that's a norm. They're feeling like they violated that.
Lee Coffin:
Well, even just the popular show, “Friends.” I mean, that's 30 years ago. It's still current, I think. And it did. There are six people intimately in each other's lives and it presents it as the norm.
Janice McCabe:
And more currently “Stranger Things,” they've got their friendship group. Yeah, there's so many like that. And I find that's actually a minority of people, of college students, who have that type.
Lee Coffin:
Interesting.
Janice McCabe:
Most are what I call compartmentalizers. They have two, to four, sometimes five different groups of friends, and often they're doing different things with those different groups. Maybe even what you described when you were talking about your theater friends, and your newspaper friends, and friends from home kind of thing. And then the third type are what I call samplers that have their network looks like a daisy flower. They have mostly one-on-one friendships, one-on-one I call them samplers, because they pick up a friend in a class, in a club, in a job, but they don't introduce their friends to each other. Their friends aren't getting to know each other. And each of those types has strengths and challenges for people. If you're a tight-knitter, you can send one group text and reach out to all of your friends, or hang out one time and hang out with all of them together, whereas that's not the case with the other types.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. No, I was about to ask you about those types because I think for students going through this transition, answer the question. Are you a tight-knitter, a compartmentalizer, a sampler, maybe a little bit? Can someone be a little bit of all of those things or no? It sounds like you have to be in one of those types.
Janice McCabe:
But people change over time also. So for example, you might, as a high school student, be a tight-knitter right now who has one group of friends that you've grown up with or gone to high school with. And then as you transition to college, rather than thinking about keeping that tight-knit group, what would it look like to become a compartmentalizer? And to meet a friendship group or two in college, still keep those ties to your high school friends and recognize too that those friends may become more or less important over time.
That's one of the also fun and challenging things about friendship research is that the term friend can mean so many different things. It can mean someone you're incredibly close to and know well versus sometimes someone that you've just met, because we don't like to call people acquaintances. It seems rude often. So we'll say they're my friend. But it can be challenging for people to know what does that mean?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. No, but even as you're saying that, I think about people I know on Facebook or LinkedIn in a more professional way. I have always been someone, you could tell me what I am as I explain this. I've always been someone that I don't connect with hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of people. It's like, if I don't really know you, I don't make a connection there. So if you look at my number, it's a small number. Versus I see some people, they have thousands. I'm like, how do you know that many people? And why do you want to have all that chatter in your newsfeed? So what am I, Janice?
Janice McCabe:
Well, that might get at also another term that sociologists uses weak ties versus strong ties. So strong ties are often how we're thinking about friendship or certainly closer friends, but those weak ties or the connections that we're less close to can bring new ideas into your network too, so they can serve different functions too. So people could also be a tight-knitter, for example, and have a lot of weak ties, or you could be a tight-knitter and not have many connections outside of that one tight-knit group.
Lee Coffin:
This is so interesting. Can you give some advice to parents? So they're witnessing this post-admission transition. How can they help?
Janice McCabe:
I think recognizing that there will likely be some anxiety at some point around friendship, either making friends or keeping friends, which is a related issue we haven't focused on directly. I focus on making, keeping, and losing friends in my book because they're all related to each other. So recognizing that this is important. College is not only about the academics, but also about the social connections that people have, that people's friendships will change over time also.
Again, in friendship, making friends isn't just a one-time process. It's things if your student hasn't found the good friends that they would like when they very first get to college, thinking about that initial friendship market period as a time to be particularly open, encouraging them to take advantage of that time to broaden their network, and then also recognizing where do these secondary markets, these pop-up markets exist. People can make friends outside of that, but those are easier times to connect with other people.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, I think you've got a cautionary warning too, that don't put so much pressure on the beginning because I think it's there, I think it's real. I saw that at the open house, people looking around and both assessing themselves against the bigger group, how did I get in? So you've got the imposter syndrome piece going there. And then a student on this pod said, "I looked around and thought, are these my people?" Which is something you've referenced. And so this awareness of likeness, or at least an awareness of the vibe, a cohort shares. But then this sprint to have best friends immediately I think is understandable.
But what I'm trying to do with this conversation is just say to everyone, yes, but give the tea time to steep. It's not going to be an instant, "This is the love of my life. This is the best friend of my life. This is the beginning of ..." It could be. That happens. I've heard lots of people tell me, "Oh, I met my best friend during orientation." I'm like, "Good for you." But I don't think students should come into orientation certainly with that pressure on themselves to ... To me, that's kismet. It happens, it happens. You can't force it.
Janice McCabe:
Yeah, that's right. That's right. There are lots of opportunities later as well, and encouraging students to participate in clubs and activities that interest them, particularly those that meet regularly where people work on something together, like a newspaper, like a performance, or just some smaller project together helps people to get to know each other in a deeper sort of way, and people are doing something that they love or they're developing their knowledge and skills and they may also be making these connections.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, you wrote, "Friendship is a process."
Janice McCabe:
It is. It's not just a one-time thing. Once you make friends, then you have to work on keeping them too as part of that process. And you also have to be willing to put yourself out there at times and take some risks, like healthy risks in the sense that sometimes you have to ask someone to, "Do you want to go study together? Do you want to grab a meal in the cafeteria? Do you want to do this or that?" And you don't know for sure what they're going to say. And even if they say no or they say something vague, maybe they're not in the friendship market, they're not looking for new friends rather than seeing it as something personally that you're doing wrong and continuing to try that when you meet other people who you think there could be a connection with.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, and some people are less extroverted than others. I think for someone who's shy or maybe more of an introvert, this may be even more intimidating. You think, "What do you mean? I'm walking into a place where I have to hustle to find new connections." You don't, but regular contact was what jumped out at me when I was reading your book that friendships bubble when you see people in a recurring way.
Janice McCabe:
Yeah, they do. So you don't have to be super extroverted, but you do have to be open to people's overtures in different ways, or someone comments on the sticker on your water bottle, be willing to have a short conversation or at least say hi to them.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Yeah. So Janice, let's close with some advice from the expert on friendship to the high school class of 2026. So they're a few weeks away from commencement, they're in this pre-matriculation phase of life. Talk to them.
Janice McCabe:
So…recognizing that friendships are incredibly important. They are things that give us a sense of belonging. They give us a sense of connection. And as you are navigating the just everyday experiences of college, going to classes, experiencing life in the dorms, in clubs and organizations, you're going to encounter people who are potential friends. And so being willing to recognize those connections and to just recognize that friendship is a process. There's always more opportunities ahead. Loneliness is normal too, it really is. There are times even when people have friends that they feel lonely and alone, and those connections are also everywhere on college campuses.
Lee Coffin:
And in your Times piece, I see you said, "New relationships reaffirm who you are."
Janice McCabe:
Yeah. We see ourselves in our friends, ways we're similar to them, ways we're different. As a social psychologists, so I think about this idea of identity construction, ways that we're, even as adults, that we're creating who we are and changing who we are, and we're seeing that reflected in our friends, in ways that we're similar, in ways that we're different from each other.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And I would add to that advice from the perspective of an admissions dean, you were applicants to a campus, the admission committee evaluated you, invited you, and you saw something that prompted you to join us, but the community you join shares a lot of qualities with you that you may not see. There's diversity certainly in these student bodies, but there's a lot of commonality that is, I hope, reassuring to know that as you come into this initial friendship market, you're not fishing in an alien place.
You've got a peer group that has been pre-screened to a degree. It doesn't mean you're going to love everybody, but there are more options for you than maybe immediately evident, so ask questions. That's the advice I always give to the entering classes. Be curious about your peers, because what each person brings to the campus may not be immediately evident. Their interests, their background, their family dynamic, their geography, I mean, all these wonderful ways people are different and complicated are true. Probe that.
Janice McCabe:
Yeah. That also reminds me that campuses aren't homogenous too. I think that's also something that's really important to remember that when we're thinking about Dartmouth, for example, there are many different Dartmouth communities. So if students aren't finding their place or their home in one aspect or one part of campus, there's lots of other things to explore. People that are so different that are coming to campus, there's always lots of clubs and organizations, there's lots of classes. There's so many different opportunities or things to explore.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Yeah. It's a good reminder. To longtime listeners of Admissions Beat, you have heard me talk about a college search being defined by four Ps, program, place, people, price. We've been talking about that third P, people, friends are your people. And at this moment of transition, those networks that will hug you, and challenge you, and make you laugh, make you yell, are part of what you signed up for. Janice, thank you for joining me on Admissions Beat.
Janice McCabe:
Oh, it's been so great talking with you.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And for people who are intrigued by what Janice is describing, her book, Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Student Networks is published by the University of Chicago Press. If you want to buy a copy, I read it, I highlighted it. It was interesting. Thanks, Janice.
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Well, friends and listeners, that is a wrap. Season nine has chatted through 16 episodes, taking the high school classes of '26 and seven from January, application process, the discovery process, and we leave you on the brink of summer. For seniors, we've just talked about the transition from home to college. You are ready to go fly. And thank you for listening to Admissions Beat. I hope these conversations have helped you navigate the college admission process and have brought you to a place where you put on that sweatshirt and you are thrilled with how it fits.
And to the high school juniors who are now rising seniors, enjoy summer, keep discovering, keep looking in the mirror and saying, "Does this feel right?" When you come back to school in September, Admissions Beat will be there waiting for you with season 10, which will pick up the story as discovery shifts to storytelling, as you have to fill out an application and introduce yourself to the colleges on a refined and narrowing list. And those episodes from September to December will do just that.
But for now, it is time for summer vacation for you and for us. So we thank you for listening. If you liked Admission Beat, please like us on whatever platform you found us, so that new listeners can find their way to Admission Beat. It's how the algorithms work. Admissions Beat is sponsored by Dartmouth College, but as always, it is not a podcast about the admissions to Dartmouth College. It is our act of citizenship to the college admission world.
It is produced and edited by Charlotte Albright. It is co-produced with editorial direction by Jacques Steinberg. I am the managing editor with episode content and storytelling focus. Technical support from Sara Morin and her team that pushes us out into the internet. And Peg Chase, my assistant, gets kudos for coordinating all the guests who made their way to Admissions Beat each week. For now, this is Lee Coffin signing off. Happy summer. We'll see you in the fall.