Chattering teeth, awkward eye contact, heads tilted down; all the common resurgences of our high school memories. Yet, are they memories or can we attest that we’ve witnessed these actions during our collegiate years?
Tension’s Routine
The first week of the spring semester has commenced, meaning the 40,000 Penn State students have infused themselves into their classes. Whether it is a mass lecture of 300 students or a confined space of 20, each student is to be caught sharing a similar routine.
Arrive at the class, scope out your intended designated seat and hope that the course will be one of success. A pivotal moment where an inner desire to find comfort in a room of strangers inevitably floats to the surface.
Despite being told college is a time where we’ll experience an intense amount of freedom and be treated as adults, a fine line between adolescence and adulthood is drawn, defining our actions as we gather into our classes for the first time. Though college is a season where generations prepare to take on the world, a fear of displacement leads to students timorously asking their fellow peers, “Is this seat taken?”
While it is evident that our fellow peers have not claimed a personal bubble or own the classroom seats, we can’t help but to request permission to ease into the unfamiliar setting.
After talking with several PSU students, it became clear that the perplexed emotions evoked on the first day are an established phenomenon.
“The ability to create connections, especially in larger lectures becomes difficult, when your peers around you are extremely closed off and make the effort to distance themselves in class,”
says Brooke Dougherty, a first year PSU student.
Doughtery is keen to the weariness of her classmate’s acute seating decisions. As she often notices how classroom peers purposely stagger their positions with a silent, yet visible fear of having to sit directly next to one another.
Pandemic Problems
Evidently, the several years of lost connection, due to the worldly pandemic, has greatly affected our generation’s social strengths. There is a willingness to stare at a piece of technology, rather than to make eye contact and speaking to a screen has become more appealing than vocalizing a conversation during class.
These cringe-worthy actions of deliberate communal anxieties are noticed by those beyond the PSU realm. Acquiring contact with Christopher Walker, a student attending Rutgers University, he openly proclaimed that “the first day is awkward.” “People don’t really talk to you, which creates an initial struggle to make friends.”
Though comfort can be found in knowing Penn State is not the only university affected by this perplexing situation, students should not be willing to continue to leave this as a societal norm.
WE ARE The Change
Our generation has curated numerous uproars, with a desire for change in situations detrimentally affecting our daily lives. So, it may be time to begin an uproar within our own circle. Not with an intention to point fingers or to supplement our present closed-off environment, but rather to alter how we’ve been interacting with each other.
We once were the young children who played outside for hours, not returning home until the sun went to sleep. We once were interconnected and found joy in the time spent together, free from the suction of the internet world. What is important to come to understand is that we are still those children, perhaps now only a few feet taller.
The timidness of socialization is not a lifestyle we should be so willing to accept. There’s evidence that a power for change begins within. Regardless of the truth that we may be adults now, perhaps we must relinquish our inner child to remove the question of “Is this seat taken?” and begin to say, “You can sit here.”
Have you experienced the first day tension? Let VALLEY know your stories by tweeting @VALLEYmag on X!
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