How to get over not having a good college experience?

You can't control the past so there's not much point stressing out over it. Learn what you can from it and apply those learnings in the present where you can actually change things. If you feel you didn't do enough social things, maybe try joining clubs, being more proactive with organising things with your friends or something else that works for you.

Everyone's experience is different and it doesn't mean you did it wrong, you just focused on the things that made more sense to you at the time. Maybe you are realising you didn't value some other things enough and that's ok, you can bring those learnings forward.

Congrats on coming into your final year btw and good luck!

My thoughts are that if you didn't make friendships or useful acquaintances during college then it's probably down first and foremost to your personality type and how your classes were scheduled. But first and foremost, your personality.

You seem to be hung up on the myth of college as "that special experience" but it's just a myth. If you happen to be just somewhat on the introvert side and your schedule mixed you up with different people for every course you were taking, good luck forging any long lasting relationships. You can socialise, of course, but if you don't share the time consistently with people then it's going to be about as long lasting as acquaintances you make on the elevator or the bus.

You will probably find you start networking much better once you get a job, simply because you will be spending time consistently with a limited amount of people.

You didn't miss much. Move on and succeed!

College is a couple of decades ago for me. I don't keep up with most of the people I met. The biggest significance it has on me at this point is the qualifications and skills I gained.

The people I've met since then have a much bigger impact on my life.

Lean in for the next chapter.

I had a shitty experience myself too.

It's just another phase of life. You'll move into the work industry and make friends there, have new experiences. Don't give this time more significance than it deserves.

So speaking from experience and a background in education, the most important thing you'll get from uni is yourself. Or more specifically, how you see yourself. Uni (college for you US folk) lets us extend our formative phase and define how we see ourselves and what we'll put out into the world going forward.

So my advice is go easy on yourself, everyone's experience is different and no one's is right or wrong. You mention a lot of great things you did, heading towards graduation with good grades and little/no debt is a huge success, sounds like you're practical, hard-working and smart. Maybe you didn't have the wild ragers, hookups, BFFs that we see in media, but I'd imagine you did have some good social experiences, casual friends, good conversations (even in classes) and the sort of interactions that help you build better relationships later on in life.

Take a deep breath, focus on the positive, which there is plenty even in your short post, and remember you've got a whole exciting life ahead of you, plenty of time for adventures, friendships/relationships, and you've put yourself in a great position to find those.

And I apologize if this sounds preachy or therapisty (and reading comments, it's not far from what others have said too), but I'm basically writing a letter to 22yo me, and at 38 now, trust me, life has been awesome after uni, so congrats on your hard work, power through to the end of the year, and take some time to feel proud of who you are and have become.

Just to add to all of this ...

College/university, for some, is an overrated and over-hyped "life event" that doesn't exist apart from in marketing land.

The relatively special thing about it is that it's probably the last stage in your life where you're forced through this process with a whole bunch of people together all at once. That means that social opportunities exist. But those opportunities aren't necessarily attractive to everybody, especially if you actually have intellectual/educational goals in mind. I learnt pretty early on that I actually didn't connect with as many as I thought I would despite plenty of social activity and despite the specific filtration that happens in taking a degree after high school. Just because you're all the same age in the same degree doesn't mean that you have that much in common. The super rich social life event is a pitch but not a reality for everyone.

I'd bet that you could do with a slightly healthier social life that suits you and isn't concerned with meeting the expectations of what college is for, but that you should feel good about having gotten your grades and hopefully a useful degree that resonates with you and your interests. Take that, leave college behind, and make the most of the actual real world that's about to open up for you.

Me, personally ... I look back on college/university and think the whole thing is mostly a waste of time. Whatever education we want or need as a society can now be delivered better (IMO) with less hassle and in a way that's actually integrated into our experience of and life within the real world. The more I think about it, the whole thing really does feel like a strangely distasteful mix of an aristocratic medieval idea of graduating into adulthood and isolating prestigious academics with modern capitalism and industrial complexes (in this case the education industrial complex).

I've been to college a lot, and now work at one, so here's my advice.

My first time through: I partied a lot (arguably too hard). I also commuted, but I made a lot of friends and had a great time for the most part. But 20 years later, I don't really talk to any of those people anymore. For a long time I had the opposite regret of you and wished that I focused a bit more on my grades.

My second time through: I went back as an established adult and focused almost entirely on my grades. My marks ended up being great, and I walked out with multiple job offers and immediately started working at a prestigious company, which I no longer work at.

My third time through: I'm doing an online program overseas now, while I happily work at the local college and otherwise spend my time with my family. This is by far my favorite version of being in school.

So my point is: school is what you make of it. You get to define what you want out of it to make it special, no one else. And regardless of what you do or did during your time in school, life will go on afterwards.

Movies make it seem like it's some magical land of partying and having life-changing experiences every week, but I think the average person just goes to class and goes home.

You may just be a bit more on the introverted side of the spectrum and that's normal. There are social expectations that we should "have lots of friends" and that college is a time to meet and hang out with people and do crazy stuff to think back on when we are in our 40s. I think those sentiments were created a few generations back when the cost of college wasn't necessarily a concern. But even you, who managed to do it so far without debt, had to think about the cost as a big factor and it impacted how you attended. Surprise! A bunch of young adults trying to get an education while being stressed about a potentially life-altering amount of debt and an uncertain future aren't really in the best place to be social and have fun. My point is don't blame yourself; the system is kind of fucked right now.

If you get your degree that's great, you'll have access to more doors in life and hopefully that means more free time to devote to things you already know you like and maybe some stuff you've yet to find out you like. If you feel like you want more friends, there are social clubs, discord servers, and meetups in towns/cities you can look into to find folks who are more or less aligned with your interests rather than your education level. There is still a lot about life you've yet to see and I think a not-so-great college experience won't be something you think about even a year after graduation.

COVID-19 really fucked with the college experience. Add to that commuting and you basically skipped the "away from home and independent for the first time experience" as well as the "captive audience" life of thousands of people your own age looking to make friends and have fun.

That said, yesterday is gone so what about tomorrow? Do you plan to move to a different city for your new career? That could be very exciting.

My college experience was similar. It ultimately led nowhere for me. I don't have a single contact anymore from my college. I don't work in the field my degree was in. It really only served to show me what I didn't want in life in retrospect. While I still had some fun and enriching experiences, college was only the reason I was where those took place. I graduated almost 10 years ago. College was basically the next highschool for me which I look back and think was a waste of time. 10 years on, I barely remember anything I learned.

Life gets better after college. Don't worry about it. Cheers pal.

Personally? I smoke weed, drink, and contemplate death. It doesn't pay the bills but it also doesn't make me happy.

I did the same thing in university. I ate, slept (usually), avoided unnecessary expenses, and focused on my grades. One day I woke up with a degree. Then another.

Then I got a job, where I largely didn't socialize and just focused on doing good work, and avoiding unnecessary expenses. Then I immigrated to another country, and kept the same habits. Then I started a company, again with the same habits.

One of the valuable things in this world is the ability to focus. There is nothing wrong with you.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

You're not dead yet; make the next phase better.

I failed out of college altogether the first time, so at least you have to going for you.

The "college experience" is different for everyone. It's also a relatively short period of your life. Instead of looking back with regret or dissapointment, look forward to what you can do after you graduate. Find community in your next endeavor, settle in, find ways you can help those in need around you. Plan adventures, build relationships with those you care about. It's technically possible to settle somewhere and grow roots.

You still have time to hit up the activity fairs and find people and clubs with common interests!

Failing that, you can apply for internships and star making connections in your field.

Serious question: are you autistic? I didn't know I was at the time but I too went through university without ever making hardly any friends. Those people I did interact with were only out of necessity like for group projects. I haven't kept in touch with any of them, and I did hardly any extra curriculars during that time. I graduated in 2019. Then in 2022 I found out I might be autistic and ended up getting diagnosed as such.

High school, college, love, work, marriage..... None of it is what you see in movies. We're all just working to get through life. There are a billion ways to 'do it right'.

I didn’t make any friends in college. It was a strange place to learn that I was an introvert. Years later I went to law school and had a much better experience. There’s just something about suffering together that builds closer bonds.

You also went to college presumably during COVID. So I’m sure that didn’t help.

But I feel college was supposed to be a special time in your life

Short answer: this is what the university marketing departments want you to think.

The long answer is that college life is different for each person, especially with respect to why they’re going to college and what they want to get out of it.

Personally, I think one of the reasons why people find going to college to be such a special time of their lives is that they are exposed to a larger cohort of people, many of whom may have very similar interests and hobbies.

Popularity in high school means SFA once you’re in such a large cohort that you don’t need to interact with people you don’t care about.

But while some people need their college to provide this environment for them, other people are perfectly happy to seek out the same things from other network they already have. Those people may not get the same level of benefit from being in college for their social lives as other people.

For me the best part about college was a (game development) club I was heavily involved in. I met a lot of good people and had good experiences. I still speak with some of the people from that and do some activities with them. This is not exclusively a college experience though. You can do this later, whether that's with coworkers or other people. There are tools out there to find people with similar interests, for example D&D is a good one.

College forces you to interact with people with similar experiences and interests, which is why it's conducive to this, but it isn't the only place it happens. You'll be fine regardless. It sounds like you just need to get past the stage of meeting new people, which is the hardest part.

Did many other students commute too? I went to a commuter school. There wasn't much student life. People mostly went to class and went home.

You had a conception of what it was supposed to be, and that might be the problem. Like you can see from these comments, a lot of people had the same experience as you. There's no "right" experience to have had. You only notice how your experience doesn't line up with your expectations, and you fail to notice what you did enjoy or gain.

I'll be real with you:

The ideal of college you believed you would experience is only for the extroverts. If you didn't make the effort to go out and meet people and do things, it's likely you'll just be going to class for 4 years.

A lot of kids think when they go to college, a social life just happens, naturally, by proximity. No, college is an excellent time, maybe the easiest time, to really socialize. But you still have to do get out of your dorm. They're not coming inside to take you away.

Write down as much detail as you can about what you did wrong so that you don’t repeat the mistakes in the future.

Take what you wrote here about exactly and precisely you missed in college, and expand it to 10 pages.

Your overall goal is to cover in as much depth these topics:

• Exactly what happened. The bare facts. “I went to college starting X date. I took XYZ classes. I lived X place. The weather was X.” etc etc.
• What role your decisions played in that story. “I chose to get a bike, and that caused XYZ. When faced with decision A1 vs A2 I decided A2 because I thought blah blah. That resulted in X.” etc
• What changes to behavior you can make going forward, to avoid the worst pitfalls in the previous experience

The only way to get over any negative life experience is to fully suck the well dry in terms of lessons learned. Any problem you encounter contains potential lessons that can help you avoid that same problem in the future. Life is long. As long as negative experiences are processed into wisdom, it works out to your benefit in the end.

But you have to perform the extraction. Performing the extraction means doing the writing. A lot of writing. As much as you can really. The more details you scrape out in your written exploration, the more completely the extraction is done.

When the experience has been totally drained of potential lessons — when you’ve articulated them all — you will be (and most importantly you will feel) over it.

That’s how you get over a mistake in life. It never goes away. It will always be in your past. But if process it, it shines as a source of good in your past, becomes something you’re proud of, because now the event consists of the fused union of the event and the lessons you learned, and those lessons are valuable enough to make it worth it.

Until you do that, you’ve got all event and no lessons, and it will feel shameful and dark in your memory.

It depends what you mean by "get over it". You'll possibly never feel good about it. But that doesn't mean that a bad time has to keep causing you to have more bad times.

I look it this way. Bad times may be living rent free in my head and I may not have any luck evicting them. That means I'll run in to them from time to time in my mental hallways. What it doesn't mean though is that I have to drop in and visit them everyday on top of that

You should make your own college!

With blackjack and hookers! ♠️♦️👯‍♀️

You're in good company. Lots of us looked back at college and wondered if we missed opportunities, or pursued the wrong major, or screwed up in general. The only advice I can offer is to make the best of your last year: join a club, take a fun elective, try to have lunch with someone new each week, do something silly like try to poop in every bathroom on campus before you graduate, etc. Five years from now you will be in a completely different phase of life and will have a whole different set of things to worry about.

Sorry for the wall of text! tl;dr: You're doing fine, and you have plenty of options to flesh out the remainder of your college experience. Relax, take a breath and open your eyes to the world around you on campus.

So I wouldn't say I'm quite on the opposite end of the spectrum from you in how my college experience went, but mine was pretty different.

I started in one major, completely switched and went to tech, got an internship, ended up dropping out and somehow managed to make a decent career. I'm not much of a party person and never was, so I didn't make a ton of friends, but the few I did make I still have.

By many metrics, some would call my experience a failure as I didn't get a degree and didn't get "the college experience." I would say that while my coursework was mostly a waste of time, the overall experience was good.

So let's start with the positives of where you're at now. You're studying, you're close to getting your degree, you sound like you will have minimal to no student loan debt...this is great! You are getting those doors opened up for you without extra shackles. Keep this in mind, and even if all else doesn't pan out, this is proof that your college experience wasn't a complete waste.

Now if we look at the other two main parts of the college experience, the social and career building aspects - let's break these down and what you can do about them. Let's start with career, as this will directly impact your future outside of school.

Have you done any internships in a field related to your studies? If not, apply now. Get that under your belt. Internships will be your golden ticket to actually breaking into your career, because they show you have experience. If you're not working already, it will require balancing your internship with your classwork in a way that would be new, but that will set you apart from your competition when it comes to applying for jobs. For me, the internship made the difference because I had already done the thing. The internship can also help with the social part. Speaking of which...

Full disclosure, I am very much an introvert, so social interaction is NOT my strong suit. lol my best friend from college and I joke that he adopted me as his pet introvert. That being said...

As for social experience - fortunately, there are numerous things you can do to make connections with fellow students on campus. You just have to place yourself in the right place at the right time. Here's the icing on the cake - you already have people you are regularly interacting with on a daily basis in your classes, and given they are in your classes there is also a good chance there are common interests there. Say hello! See if you can set up a study group with your classmates. Doing so gives you an opportunity to get to know your classmates outside of your classes, and can lead to building up friendships with some of them.

Wander through the buildings on campus and watch out for bulletin boards. Often campus organizations or clubs will post flyers for upcoming events, and these can be a good place to network with peers that you may not otherwise run into. Additionally, you may be able to reach out to your student government or academic advisor to request pointers on groups you can potentially join to help with this too.

Or maybe you are walking around and you stumble onto some kind of event going on. If it's open to the campus, join on in. Stand next to someone and tell them what you think of the event, or ask them what they think of it. It gives you a way to start a conversation.

If you're an introvert like myself, those suggestions above will be uncomfortable, but that is okay. It's the tradeoff for making those connections, and it will pass.

If your grades are good and you enjoy your major, could I suggest becoming a tutor/teaching assistant for a class or professor you liked? It would give you a way to interact with people in your major that might even be in your other classes (whether that's other TAs or the students you're teaching), you'd get something for your resume, a professor to use as a job reference, and you should even get paid!

I can relate but lack of socializing in college didn't bother me (I'm an introvert). Didn't make any friends during undergrad and made some friends during my grad program that I still talk to but most of my friends are from high school.

Everyone's college experience is different and just because it didn't check certain boxes (unless they're important to YOU), that doesn't mean you failed. I think it's put out there to be this special time in your life but "special" is subjective.

Same here. I also commuted. Honestly I felt kind of robbed of the college experience I wanted. I went to grad school and had a much funner time.

I did a shitton of drugs and fucked everything that moved for the entire semester I was allowed to remain at university, then they kicked me out. I don't regret a single thing. Now, you'll have no debt going foward in life, which is a huge leg up, and now you can put some concerted effort into doing things socially if you want to, it's just more difficult as a university setting there's a captured community forced to interact, and it's difficult to find that on your own out in the working world. Difficult, but not impossible. Best of luck.

Honestly the only friends I still speak to from college I met in my last year. By then maybe you start having the same classes with certain people so it's easier to introduce yourself or discuss homework. If you still want to meet people the last year or two are the best time to make real connections. But as everyone else has said life tends to open up in different ways after college anyway

In college, I focused a lot of my time on working in a laboratory and studying with a difficult major. I also did have a close group of friends but I was far too committed to school.

It ends up working out, most people grow apart from college. It is a special time in your life, you are learning about who you are and what you like to do. Ultimately, in my opinion, it was far more important to me to learn how to work hard, solve complex problems and be resourceful than the social aspects.

If it is your last year, I would heavily recommend focusing on connections with staff, career services, other people who will be useful for getting a job, figuring out how to best apply all these skills you’ve learned into a career.

I was able to use a connection from a class to get into a job that led to the role I’ve been at happily for over a decade. So, definitely I would think about the future, connect with those around you, try to trust yourself that you’ll figure it out.

The relevant measure of having done college right is getting a degree at the end. Keep your eye on the ball, everything else is a distraction.

I read socialist analysis of alienation under capitalism and that seemed to do the trick for me.