Making connections and friends in Cambridge: Tips and advice from first-year students
Students in the Dining Hall
The Wellbeing Team had the pleasure of meeting Trinity Hall’s new first-year undergraduate students at the start of their first academic year in College.
In our wellbeing workshops, students shared ideas on how to make connections and build friendships. Most of these ideas will be relevant to anyone who would like to make new connections, regardless of their year or level of study:
- Actually introduce yourself to others
- Arrive early for induction events, social events, lectures and supervisions and use this time to connect with others who are present at that time (smaller number of students)
- Get to know your roommates
- Get to know your coursemates
- Create or be part of a study group
- Say ‘yes’ to the social opportunities that present themselves
- Utilise social media
- Attend the Cambridge SU Freshers’ Fair and sign up to student clubs and societies (3 and 4 October on Parker’s Piece)
- Bond over the Silly the cat
- Explore Cambridge together
- Organise a tea party
- Grab a coffee with someone
- Find a common interest to discuss
- Identify a shared interest and organise an activity together around this (e.g. walking, climbing, museums)
- Eat together
- Speak to the people next to you wherever you are
- Sit on the wall at Tit Hall
- Have a fun fact or joke or two up your sleeve
- Don’t be scared of people in older years
- Be nice
- Keep in touch with people you know already
- In addition to group activities, try to get some one-on-one time with potential friends
Here are links to some information and resources that provide advice and tips on making friends as well as opportunities to meet others with a shared interest:
- University of Cambridge Student Support: Ways to Connect: Finding Friends and Making Connections at Cambridge (including a video)
- Student Minds: Friendship and Social Life
- Cambridge SU Societies Directory
If you need help thinking about how you can make social connections, you can always speak to your Tutor and/or the Wellbeing Team (wellbeing@trinhall.cam.ac.uk).
