“I think it’s important for a person to feel like someone knows them.”

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Transcript for Not Just Another Student

During my freshman year here, it was really hard for me to adjust to the college life.  It was really hard for me to make friends just because I’ve had the same friends since the early days of elementary school all the way through senior year in high school, and I never really felt the need to practice making new friends, so coming to college, it was really difficult for me because I wasn’t really sure how to find a group that I would fit in with. So, most of the time, I would just go to class, and come back, and do my homework.  If anything, I would hang out with my sister, because she was a senior when I was a freshman. She did tell me about St. Teresa’s.  We are Catholic, and that’s where she found, like, a community. She really enjoyed having a place to express her faith, and wanted to be sure that there was a church that I’d be able to find, and feel comfortable going to, and I definitely found that here.

When sophomore year came around, and I got more involved with St. Teresa’s, I realized that this could be the group that I find my friends with, and I didn’t realize how lonely at times, when I felt like I didn’t really have people to hang out with, so it was just, it was really cool to find that I felt like I belonged when I was at St. T’s because there’s—any time I would go there to study, or work on homework, or go to an event, there would always be a ton of people there who were just as willing as I was to look for friends.

One time that I felt that I belonged was at St. Teresa’s.  This was last semester—we went on a mission trip to New Orleans, and I feel like I was still kind of getting to know people.  There were a lot of people at St. T’s that I hadn’t got the chance to meet yet, and in going on this mission trip with them, it was during one week of our spring break, so I got to spend a week with, you know, maybe like twenty-five students down in New Orleans.  We were doing, like, Habitat for Humanity-type work where we were helping to rebuild houses and, like, repaint things, and just clean up areas.

I feel like I was really able to belong because I got to meet all these people that I hadn’t known before, and they actually wanted to get to know me back, so it was like, a mutual thing—it wasn’t that I was just tagging along on this trip—where I actually felt included in the work we were doing as a group together for other people, and I got to bond with the people that I was doing that with.

Since I was with a group that had similar goals as I did, it made me feel more comfortable with, you know, actually sharing things with them, and getting to know them better, like, I was able to talk with them easier because I felt that we had things in common, and we were all working towards a similar goal. I think it’s important for a person to feel like someone knows them, you know?  It’s important to be in a space where you don’t feel like you’re just another student.