this text is somewhat exaggerated so please take it with a grain of salt
Here is a story of my struggles as a freshman at university trying to find people.
So I have recently been accepted into a cs course at a university and initially I was really excited but then I realized something; I didn’t know anybody. “What should I do?” I asked myself and being the genius introvert that I am, I decided to solve this problem systematically like a damn math problem.
I started by listing what I had to do to be able to say I have made new friends and also what I could do to achieve this goal. Since I hadn’t previously made any serious attempts to make a new friend or acquaintance I didn’t really know what I could call a friendship. As a result I went with the following vague set of restrictions to differentiate just knowing someone and being friends with them:
That takes care of the statements of the problem. Now I had to list what I already had as an assumption:
As it turns out I know nothing about society, what a surprise. So I
tried to take an indirect route and use other people’s knowledge and/or
their connections with other other people. Searching for people I knew,
I found one person. Lets call him Mr P.Z. Mr P happened
to be a very famous figure in the faculty of math (which provides the cs
course we both are taking at the moment). Being confident in his social
skills I asked him about ways to make a friend. He knew absolutely
nothing about it but had many friends already who we could ask the same
thing. What was their answers you may ask? Well nobody knew anything
either and I was left to fuck mess around and find out.
After my recent failures in finding solutions to my problem I decided to choose a different strategy: do random things until I reach my desired results Which happens to be a very valid solution to very big problems. However, I couldn’t just decide on a set of moves and a random function to make a choice out of them. Since society is a very complex concept, there are not any such predefined sets. So I made some up and went with them.
Firstly I decided to do what had worked for me up until now in school and high school: absolutely nothing. As it turns out in university unlike school and high school there are no such mechanisms in place to help students get to know each other. Usually I relied on teachers calling the names of my other classmates to get to know their names and for students in other classes that I had no other way of contacting I just gave up on knowing them.
To literally no one’s surprise I didn’t succeed in making any new friends using the first method. So I tried a second method, to rely on a successful person and copy their actions. This was my first effective experiment. I went to some other person I relatively knew previously, who we shall call Mr R from here on out, and just tried to be around him. Knowing that he is a social person I had high hopes for this experiment and it paid off. I got to meet at least 3 other people. Do you understand the graveness of this? I went from 0 to 3 new people. That’s like a 3/0 ratio, it’s basically infinite!
So I’m currently trying to either find other ways to accomplish my goals or expand this only working method I know of. If you are reading this and struggling with new environments or trying to make friends like I do, I suggest you do not follow in my footsteps as I’m not really a reliable person but if you do or have any other suggestions for me I would be happy to hear about them.