My first post in the “Done with Frosh Year Reflections” series was about living away from home. I touched on how I became more independent, realized that responsibility comes with freedom, and became more appreciative of my parents and upbringing. In this post, I’ll share about dorm life, making friends, and how I found my “home away from home”.

Before coming to college, I was most excited about dorm life and making meaningful friendships, and I believed that the two were strongly correlated. My thinking was that ideally, where you live is where your closest friends are, er rather, where your closest friends are is where you live. At MIT, the housing process is unique in that each of the 11 undergraduate residence halls have their own distinctive culture – some more distinct than others – and we students, for the most part, get to choose where we live. Every spring, MIT students from different dorms create i3 (Interactive Introduction to the Institute) videos to give prefrosh (a term for soon-to-be freshmen) a glimpse of the culture of the dorms. In the summer, prefrosh then submit their rankings of which dorms they would like to be placed in. When school starts in the fall, there is something called REX (Residence EXploration) where freshmen can explore each of the dorms more and if they wish to switch dorms, they can enter into the FYRE (First Year Residence Exchange) lottery.

I personally had a hard time ranking the dorms. While I did visit most of the dorms during CPW (Campus Preview Weekend) and I watched all the i3 videos multiple times, I couldn’t figure out my top 3 choices until it was very close to the deadline to submit housing rankings. I ended up being placed in my fourth choice dorm, a co-ed cook-for-yourself community dorm with numbered and cultured houses that was located second furthest on Dorm Row. My twin sister was also placed in the same dorm as me, although she ranked it third. When it was time for REX, I participated in my dorm’s In-House Rush, a day for deciding which sub-community within the dorm you wished to live in. Because I knew more upperclassmen in a certain sub-community from my pre-orientation program, I chose to live there. I ended up rooming with a fellow freshman who actually had a very similar class schedule as I did, which was convenient. However, as I got the hang of classes and settled in, I realized that my social life was lacking something. I wasn’t very happy and I felt that I didn’t really belong in my community. The friendships I had made so far seemed superficial, and I longed to find a group of people I felt comfortable with talking about basically anything.

First semester ended with me feeling intellectually enlightened but socially lacking, so I purposed to be more initiative in social situations and be more active in clubs that fostered my interests when second semester came around. I got a new schedule, and I saw my new classes as new social opportunities. I also decided to invest one hour a week in MIT Asian Dance Team (ADT). This was something I had not planned to do before college, but I thought of it as a perfect opportunity to get some exercise, learn something new, and meet people. Perhaps one of the best decisions I made during freshman year was joining the Asian Christian Fellowship (ACF). ACF was such a welcoming community, and I felt very much at home during weekly CGs (Community Groups or Couch Gatherings). I met some of the most admirable people in ACF, and I also grew close to the other freshmen in ACF. As the semester rolled on, I found myself spending a lot of time psetting (a term for doing homework, or psets), derping around, and basically enjoying myself in a certain dorm that was an all-girls meal-plan dorm located second along Dorm Row. I felt that the best thing I could do for myself in college was to find a nice group of people to enjoy college with, and so I went with my gut feeling and decided to move dorms starting sophomore fall simply because I felt I would be happier there.

Although it took me almost a whole school year to find my “home away from home”, I am glad that I did in rather unexpected ways. College is a time for exploration and life is full of surprises. :)