Cliques in College: A Bad Thing?

High school was a time where jocks would hang out with other jocks; preps would hang out with other preps, and so forth. To put it simply, high school was nothing more than a home for clique.

I never did understand why students always tend to gravitate towards cliques, but they do! Maybe it's a comfort issue for people who want to be immediately accepted. Whatever the reason for this may be, people refuse to leave their comfort zones.

I remember how frustrated teachers would be with students for not welcoming new people and ideas into their lives. Teachers would constantly preach to students how they needed to rid their minds of cliques because college didn't contain any. But let's be honest, college students are recently graduated high school students. No person changes that much over the course of a summer. So how different could college really be?

Entering my freshmen year at Shepherd, I was expecting things to be just as my teachers described; clique free. I was looking for emo kids to be hanging out with the jocks and a lot of other crazy combinations. For the most part, this was not the case.

I remember walking into the Dining Hall with a group of friends, feeling like I was in high school all over again. The Frat boys were sitting together and the jocks were sitting together. There was absolutely no diversity amongst people. Everyone just sat in their little cliques, refusing to open up to people that weren't in their group of friends.

But are cliques really that bad? Isn't it easier to make friends with people similar to you? One student responded, "You make friends faster when you talk to people like yourself. You have more in common and it makes you feel more comfortable in the new college setting."

Maybe this student has a point, that people are way too concerned about cliques. If cliques are such a bad thing, then why don't students start opening up to people they normally would not?

By staying in cliques, people miss out on the diversity of the world. I'm not going to pretend that I don't hang out with people similar to myself, because I do. However, my time spent at Shepherd has been a learning process for me. I've gradually opened up to people I would normally brush away. By doing this, I've made friends with some of the most interesting people I have ever met.

If people continue to stay in their cliques, they will miss out on so much. Yes, I understand you may have more in common with certain people, but don't chain yourself to one idea. Open up and explore the world around you. The most wonderful person you could ever meet may be out there waiting, but most people will never have the chance to meet this person because they refuse to unhinge themselves from their cliques.