Advice for P’26s
Today’s Daily Deac is geared towards our P’26 incoming families. While so much of the last year of your ’26 student’s life might have been geared towards getting into college, feeling at home in their new surroundings will take time and work on their part – but it will happen!
As you are talking to your incoming ’26 student this summer, it is worth discussing strategies to make friends and build their social network. Some examples:
Join campus organizations and go to their meetings and events
Meet your hallmates – knock on doors and introduce yourself
Make connections with students in your classes; email/text introductions
Make eye contact, smile, and say hello to everyone you meet as you walk around campus
Invite people to join you for lunch, dinner, coffee, etc.
Put yourself out there
No matter where you go to college, the transition to college takes time, and it might feel rocky for a while until students find their footing. Here is some advice from a member of the Class of 2019 who had struggled to find her niche at Wake:
“Two pieces of advice that come to mind are that 1) the first semester is hard for everyone, even friends from home whose social media says otherwise, and 2) you just have to keep putting yourself out there, which I appreciate can be really hard. Joining clubs, raising your hand in class, doing things with your hall are all great places to start. I remember feeling awkward asking to join in on plans, but the positive response I received when I put myself out there at Wake encouraged me to make plans and include as many people as possible.
I’ll share a funny story from when we dropped my brother off for his freshman year at another college. My parents and I attended the family orientation, where the provost explained that students will call home with all sorts of reactions, one of which is that everyone else has made best friends for the rest of their life and there is no one left for them to be friends with.
Obviously this is not the case, and the hyperbole was all the more humorous because I knew that I had called home with similar worries just two years prior. In fact, I called home with nearly every anxiety the provost mentioned that day! If anything, just admitting that the transition is hard is a great first step, and I think that if students are the first to say it, they will be shocked how many people will respond, “oh my gosh, I thought I was the only one.” It took me about a year and half to come to that realization at Wake.”
So help prepare your ’26s now for the fact that the adjustment to college and finding a friend group takes effort. And the more effort they put into it, the faster things might fall into place.
— by Betsy Chapman, Ph.D. (’92, MA ’94)