#BetterTogether | Finding a Sense of Belonging

So something I struggled with freshman year would be fighting my sensible AV groove. And college isn't always going to be easy. Loneliness is a really common emotion. I felt like do I belong here? Like I don't have the same experiences everyone else I knew going in to college, I needed a support system. I got in trouble pretty early on. And to my freshman year, the student conduct process focused on helping me find my place at Virginia Tech. So to find the sense of belonging, definitely took a little while to kind of feel out the community first and see how people interacted with each other. They are homesick. You miss your group of friends, her support system back a home. The process of becoming rooted in a community. And if you think about the metaphor of being routed, when you plan something, it takes a while to, to develop the support system that makes you feel like you're part of something. If you're thinking that you're going to have the best friend group the moment you walk in and maybe true that he will, but if he don't, there's plenty of opportunities to make friends throughout the year by joining clubs, I've found people who share common interests with me that wasn't just academics. Punishment for lack of a better term, was to go in and find groups and find people and find things to be a part of them on campus. I don't have the same background as everyone else. And that's when I started to seek cultural organizations. I would say you're going to find or you vibe with who your group is. I wish that I went out and made more friends and I did my freshman year pushing through that discomfort that it feels to be new and to not be known, but to show up his stuff. First huge step, as, you know, nerve-wracking and stressful as it is to go out and try to meet new people and join the organization. I would go back and do that a thousand times over.