With the abrupt transition from high school to college comes the uneasy separation from friends and family. The familiar faces that filled the classrooms for twelve years are suddenly missing. The friends that would show up at your house without calling just to watch stupid horror movies, eat your junk food, or gossip tirelessly, are spread across the country.
Wishful freshmen cling to the prospect of maintaining close relationships with those who have been in their lives up until Tufts, but like many of her peers, freshman Danielle Lopez is experiencing difficulty staying close with her high school friends.
"It's harder than I expected because they, like me, have made new friends at school, so they are less able to relate to me as they could in high school," Lopez said. "My younger friends from home still talk to me, but I feel older then them ... it's a different relationship when you don't see them every day."
From unscientifically polling and interviewing many Tufts students, it is apparent that between freshman year and senior year, there is an immense transformation in students' attitudes towards staying close with high school friends and family members.
Of 38 freshmen asked how often they talk to their parents, 31.5 percent said that they usually talk to their parents more than four times a week. Many commented that although they do not make a habit of calling home regularly, their parents make an effort to call often. Only two freshmen contacted said that they have spoken to their parents less than once a week on average.
Sophomores responded similarly to freshmen in that of the 24 polled, 26 percent said that they talked to their parents more than four times a week. The majority of juniors and seniors, however, said that they talked to their parents less frequently: on average, twice a week. Only two of the 20 seniors surveyed said that they talked to their parents every day, compared to 18 percent of the freshmen surveyed.
Similarly, freshmen were much more likely to talk to their high school best friends on a regular basis than sophomores were. Of those polled, 42 percent of freshmen said that they talked to their high school best friends more than three times a week, compared to only 21 percent of sophomores.
Almost all of the juniors and seniors asked, however, responded that they infrequently talked to their high school best friends, and averaged once or twice a month rather than weekly.
The methods used for staying in touch with friends from high school or from home also varied from year to year. The majority of freshmen polled, 60 percent, said that they communicated with their friends by using AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). 30 percent said that they generally called their friends to keep in touch. Only the remaining 10 percent said that they used e-mail to stay close with friends.
By contrast, 80 percent of the sophomores and 90 percent of the juniors and seniors polled said that they primarily used AIM. Several students explained that AIM was the easiest way to stay in touch because almost everyone is on all of the time. Students also cited financial reasons for relying on AIM to keep in touch.
"I don't want to run out of my phone minutes, [so] AIM is the least expensive way to talk," senior Tiara Winn said. Other students from various years made similar comments about the expense of calling friends regularly.
Not all upperclassmen completely abandon the friends that they made before coming to Tufts. Some, like senior Jon Parnes, use creative methods to close the gaps that may form in long-distance friendships.
"I think I've done a pretty good job of staying in touch with my friends," senior Jon Parnes said. "One of them created a Yahoo! group, and we've been e-mailing each other that way. Even when we lose touch, though, when we get back together, we have a great time and it feels like we've barely been apart."
