You’re midway through the first semester of the year. A lot of the newness has worn off, replaced with the busyness of everyday life, assignments, tests, and activities. At some schools, rush has already happened, replaced by pledge pins and people in bright new letters; at other schools, you’re waiting for the start of next semester to go Greek, with this semester full of preview parties and meet-and-greets. No matter where you are, you have no doubt been inundated with opportunities to join up with other students: clubs, Bible studies, honor societies, leadership organizations, student government, intramural teams—the list goes on and on. Hopefully you’ve found a place in one, many, or all of them, filling your schedule with too many activities to count and your life with a host of new friends.
Or maybe your year has been more like my first year of college. When I left home, my church college minister told all of us heading off to school that college provided the ideal opportunity to remake yourself if you wanted to. No one at your college would know who you were before you arrived there, so you could make yourself into whomever and whatever you wanted to be. Perfect! I thought. Gone would be the band nerd and overall academic nerd that I had been in high school. In her place would be the popular, uber-social girl involved in every activity I had observed at my college for years at homecoming. I plunged in headfirst to my plan as soon as I arrived on campus, signing up for spring semester sorority rush and applying for every freshman leadership organization or activity that was offered. (Never mind that the resume I used to apply to all of these clubs contained all of the high school activities I had pledged to distance myself from!)
And I was rejected from EVERYTHING. Every single leadership organization. Every single sorority. Every single service organization. (I did actually make it onto one school spirit committee, but the organizers selected everyone who applied, including a guy whose “application” was scrawled on the back of the slip of paper requesting information, as opposed to my five page, typewritten response, so I didn’t think that really counted.) Whatever happened to my great transformation?!?
Over the course of that year, as I saw my hopes of reinventing myself dashed, God taught me a lot about who I was, and who I was in Him. I learned that there is nothing wrong with stretching the boundaries of the box I had found myself in, but that I still had to stay faithful to who God had made me to be. And, quite frankly, God hadn’t made me to be the super-outgoing, super-involved girl I was trying to make myself into. There is nothing wrong with being that person, but it just wasn’t me. And if I had continued trying to be something I wasn’t, and particularly if I had had the opportunity to perpetuate that through tons of activities where I would have had to play that role to other people, it wouldn’t have been genuine. So instead of trying to make hundreds of new friends in dozens of organizations, I invested myself in deep relationships with a handful of close friends, and expanded my circle as I met their friends and their friends’ friends. I continued to focus on school (you can only deny the nerd so much!), but gave myself the freedom to have fun and go to movies and sporting events. (I think it would have been a huge mistake for me to run the complete opposite direction from social rejection and throw myself into academics with no social life whatsoever!) Over time, as I accepted who I really was, I found organizations that gave me an outlet to be myself, and was even elected to leadership positions in them. And I had fun! By the time I graduated, I might not have been the homecoming queen, but I had stayed true to myself and to whom God created me to be. My relationship with God deepened now that I was no longer asking him to make me something I wasn’t. And I even saw it as a blessing that He had created me the way He had, with unique gifts, talents, and abilities that even those super-social girls might not have.
So if, like me, you find your plans for college reinvention being derailed by the powers that be who guard the gates of official campus organizations, take heart. Take the time to seek God deeply and ask who He made you to be, and more importantly, who He wants you to become. Then spend your time in college seeking to become whoever that is, rather than whoever your college would tell you that you should be. GET INVOLVED, but stay true to yourself! With that perspective in mind, who says rejection is a bad thing?!?
Amanda Gartner Franklin, UBC kid-turned-grown-up, Baylor Class of 2003 & 2006, and friend to college students
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