After something happened on campus, I saw a tweet that indicated that the incident was described in more detail on a Reddit thread, so I checked it out for the 1st time. What I found was that within the umbrella of a thread named after the university were a whole assortment of subgroups (sorry, I don't know the Reddit terminology for how things are structured). My curiosity was piqued. I did some cursory exploring, and found one highlighted group with the name "Find a Buddy @
<uni name>".
It appears that the campus has a bunch of students, especially in their 1st and 2nd years, who spend their days alone between classes and labs, eating their lunch alone, studying in the library alone, just passing the time sitting at a bench alone, apparently desperate, completely DESPERATE for someone else to talk to, and they post in Reddit searching for someone to be able to interact with while on campus. I was surprised at how emotionally naked some of these plaintive pleas were, with posts consisting of "Does anyone want to hang out between classes? Just hang out and talk about nothing in particular, just hang out and talk?"; some students try to elicit interest by describing their musical
tastes, what video game platform(s) they have and which games they play, what comics/manga they read, etc. I felt rather depressed after scrolling through a couple of pages consisting of several dozen posts. I imagine I'd have thought very differently about continuing on in academia if each day at the university was an exercise in isolation and loneliness.
Q: Is it like this at other really large urban commuter campuses, does this also occur at small (more residential) campuses, or does my particular uni have more than its fair share of sad sack lonely people?
- Prof Poopiehead
Yes. Recent grad from large commuter school (maybe even your school if I'm thinking of the right incident; let's neither of us mention specifics) and currently pretending I'm an adjunct at another such school. It's lonely. There's a small kernel of activity that is the student body that stays on campus. If you're not a part of that you're kind of screwed.
ReplyDeleteLife is just a series of doors that lead into rooms. You start in an empty room and everyone promises the next room will be amazing. And so you go into the next room and it's just a fucking empty room. But the NEXT room is where it's at. So you keep going through these empty rooms until there's no door. And then you're dead.
At least some of my rooms had cool books in them. Communion with dead people/people in other places via the printed page is socialisation of a sort, surely?
DeleteSorry life's so bleak - hoping there's something better around the corner for you
--Grumpy Academic--
I see this on Yik Yak at my non-urban school. College can be lonely, perhaps in part because students have been told that it should be the happiest four years of their lives.
ReplyDeleteThe honesty of the posts were jarring at first since everything else on Yik Yak was abusive or sarcastic. It was revealing that nobody taunted the honest/lonely posts, suggesting that everybody was acknowledging their situation.
Mmmmm. I removed Yik Yac from my device only hours after installing it because it seemed such a cesspool. Perhaps I was premature and there was something useful to be gleaned, even from the cesspool.
DeleteI'm thinking it is accurate. My son was at a commuter school for two years and had a hell of a time----he never met anyone there. He basically waited until his high school friends came home from their sleep away U's(none--not one of them had the same lonely experience were they did not have A SINGLE PERSON to talk to) to socialize.
ReplyDeleteSorry for the typos!!
DeleteI had a heartbreaking realization last semester when I overheard a student say, "Group work is the only time I get to talk with other students."
ReplyDeleteSad. I was largely a commuter student but managed to meet and hangout with other students from my classes. Of course, I spent a lot of time with my head buried in books--like I was supposed to. I think part of the problem is modern tech and the introverted tendencies it breeds and enables.
ReplyDeleteAs a proffie with a heavy advisor load I can attest that this is true with my campus even though fresh are about 95% residential. Some of it is the fucking phone's fault I must say. 20 18 year old people sitting near each other in silence staring at screens.
ReplyDeleteI'm at a mostly residential campus and judging from Yik Yak, we have a loneliness problem too. Only ours is more along the lines of "everyone else seems to have found their friends."
ReplyDeleteWould designating certain tables as "sit here if you're up for talking to people" help, do you think?
"Look at that loser sitting at the lonely table!"
DeleteIt would definitely depend on how it was pitched. I think students on my campus would be into something like that if it were portrayed as a way for them to potentially help others, a la the calls that always go out to talk to your neighbors in the wake of a suicide or domestic violence incident.
DeleteI dunno.
I happened to see this on Facebook: the Buddy Bench.
Deletehttp://mashable.com/2016/03/30/buddy-bench-school/#vGXz9Qwbp5qI
"some students try to elicit interest by describing their musical tastes, what video game platform(s) they have and which games they play, what comics/manga they read, etc."
ReplyDeleteAs I read that, my first thought was that each of those activities is often done solo. In the old days, if we wanted to do them with others, we actually had to get to know some real people instead of communing with avatars in a virtual world ready-made to suit those interests. So I'm in agreement with those who attribute the phenomenon in question to our modern tech.
This was my college experience back in 1988-92-ish, first at a community college and then at a small liberal arts college. I ate alone, I studied alone, and I made no friends other than a few acquaintances Id chat with before class started. At the SLAC, I met a very nice young woman who really, really tried to be friends with me, but some recent friend-zasters led me to keep her at arms' length.
ReplyDeleteDuring my MA, I met lots of warm, welcoming, friendly people... and it changed my life. Until I befriended some undergrads one summer. Bad move. They seemed mature for upperclassmen, but they really were just frat boys who were temporarily lonely between semesters. I had avoided those types all through undergrad and somehow there they were bothering me when I needed more serious people in my life.
At the doctoral school, most were long-distance commuters, so many of us often ate alone on campus. We all had such odd schedules, whether classwork or teaching, we rarely saw one another. It was disheartening after my experience in the MA program.