Lost in the crowd

Welcome Class of 2013, you are poised to be the largest freshman class ever enrolled at this University and you should all be proud to be a part of it. The funny thing is-everyone else already here was once a part of the fleeting "largest class ever" gimmick. Instead of taking false pride in a meaningless statistic, what you should really be thinking is that you are now, as an individual, the most statistically irrelevant person to ever grace the sanctity of this place.

Texas A&M is big - 48,039 students as of last year, and apparently still counting. So that makes you small, as in smaller than ever before, and you are literally the smallest fish in the biggest fish pond ever.

Orientation programs like Fish Camp and New Student Conference will certainly prove to be beneficial to those of you that attended in terms of meeting new people, but eventually it will occur to you that you would rather dodge cars on the highway than spend the next four years hanging around the same people you met in your Fish Camp DG.

So where does that leave you? Probably hopeless, lost and isolated in the midst of a Mecca of Aggies returning to campus to fulfill their own agendas-with little to no time to nurture you.

Hopefully, you are coming here with the mentality that making friends amongst 48,039 students will be easy. And to many it really is. But to some, when it comes to socializing versus the enticing mystical realm of World of Warcraft, staying in and driving your roommate crazy with 16-hour binges of online warfare wins out every time. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, not to your face anyway, but when you look back on your college career and something appears to be lacking, just know that I really want what's best for you.

As humans, we are wired to be social creatures-it's just that some are better at it than others. On your first day, when you walked into your first class of 300 people, some of you were overwhelmed while others saw opportunity. But if step one to your plan of meeting people in college is creeping on people in class, you may soon find that you were mistaken. The person you sit next to one day may very well be lost in a sea of blank faces the next-two rows and eight seats too far away for you to work on reestablishing your awkward first-day relationship.

Call me a realist, but I'm willing to admit that I will never meet every student here. I've never even met Reveille. The point is, this is nothing like your high school, but you are all probably aware of that. In four years or so, you are going to walk the stage amongst hundreds of strange faces that you have never seen before, but hopefully you will have more than a few friends sprinkled in there as well.

All said, the best way to meet people and find friends here is to isolate the numbers. Parties are one excellent way to comfortably talk to people in an open and casual setting, but the catch is that you have to actually know someone to score an invitation in the first place.

Soon you will find that here, at the school appropriately named via an acronym, we are all about organizations and acronyms. Whether it be through a church group, Freshman Leadership Organization (FLO), volunteer organization, Greek Life, Student Government (SGA), the Corps of Cadets, the A&M Quidditch team or whatever else is out there-there is a legitimate activity for everyone to find their place here.

Getting involved in something, anything, is by far the easiest and best way to find your fit here at this school. So do it.

Don't be so na've to think that this place is perfect for everyone. In 2007, a U.S. News & World Report claimed A&M has a 90 percent freshman retention rate. When you sit in those blank seas of 300 faces try to keep in mind that 30 of them won't even be around next year.

So get involved. Don't just be a statistic. Turn yourself into a real, contributing person by finding yourself a niche and making the best of it. And if all else fails, don't bail on us-stick it to the man and form an organization of your own. That way all your friends will come to you, and what is cooler than that?

Steve Humeniuk is a senior political science major.

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