Remember when we were toddlers who retreated to mother, clinging to her arm as she introduced us to some unfamiliar people? The typical reaction to strangers of a four-year-old reflects that, while humans have an innate desire to associate with others, we have a propensity to gravitate toward associations that offer close relationships within familiar settings. Once we leave our families to begin our college adventure, bonding within small groups, or cliques, and establishing close relationships can act as ways to partially satiate that need for the familiar, stable human interaction that is generally attributed to mothers early in children’s lives. Although the intensity of that desire may lessen as we grow to be independent of our mommies, it’s still present as we age, although in a subtler form than that of a toddler’s clinging to his or her mother. Instead of grasping for our moms in terror as we did when we were toddlers meeting new people, we college students can use cliques as a way to avoid the unfamiliar by latching onto one group in which we are most comfortable.
If cliques reflect that craving for stability when students are away from their families, why do they have such a negative connotation? Cliques can, to some extent, answer our natural plea to “belong,” at least if we are lucky enough to be accepted into one in the first place. Is a clique necessarily divisive, always sacrificing consideration for outliers in order to maintain the exclusivity of its members? At Elizabethtown, I’ve found that I know at least one person in nearly each official or unofficial group on campus, and since most of the people are friendly, each group seems more accessible than I expected. While I have sometimes eaten alone and have seen some people eat alone during certain times in the week, I have never seen anyone eat alone every single day; now that is something distinctive about a college. In my mind, a fact like that has even more significance than a college’s percentage of students who study abroad or an institution’s regional distinction.
It’s great to have close relationships, and I think that Etown has succeeded in fostering interpersonal engagement within its student population. The clubs and the unofficial cliques here have impressed me with their network of personal interaction, in which I, even as a first-year student, have felt included. Moreover, that network has, at least in my Etown experience thus far, shown itself to offer a more welcoming admittance to and a less divisive feel regarding cliques than I expected of such a small institution.
In my experience at Etown, I’ve noticed that a great number of the campus groups actively recruit members. Moreover, whether or not the clique’s shared topic is the field of engineering or a passion for the stage, its members have outside friendships that often override any sense of exclusivity. I’m not an engineer, and I have little interest in that field, but I hang out with several engineering majors. I’m not an Occupational Therapy (OT) student, but my roommate and several of the people with whom we eat lunch and hang out with are OT majors. In fact, sometimes it appears to me that half of Etown’s entire student population is studying OT. Yet most Etown cliques appear to be flexible enough to retain the clique’s intimate feel without excluding friends, who may have absolutely no connection to the clique except one member’s friendship. Admittance varies by group, of course; that is generally true for any crowd. However, I have yet to find one here that doesn’t welcome new people to associate with it. Many of the cliques that I have encountered are basically value-based; students tend to interact with people who share their interests, and shared activity in that commonality is manifested as an established group.
I think that having established cliques, like the “peer groups” to which every single student is assigned in their first year, can help students acclimate to college life. I have found it helpful to have a transition from high school to college that dissects the mass of new people into less intimidating groups, like the First Year Seminar groups. As a first-year student, I feel especially comfortable in my First Year Seminar group; being assigned to that “clique” from the very beginning, I had the opportunity to familiarize myself with a few people at first, which lessened the overwhelming crowd of new faces during my initial week at Etown. As the semester progressed, that group maintained its familiar feel, and only because I felt comfortable in that smaller group was I enough at ease to reach out and actively broaden my base of friendships.
Basically, the cliques here at Etown remind me of a parade in which every student is marching. Deciding in which sections each student wants to march is subjective, but students can be certain of a fanfare greeting them at each corner of the route.
