Skip to main content

Random Connection

I had opportunity to visit my mentee at his college campus earlier in the month. S is a freshman and getting into the swing of things, understanding the joys and struggles of long awaited freedom that comes with adulthood. Yet again as I have seen with a few kids I have know cross this rite of passage, S was staying close to the few people he lucked upon in the first days and weeks. The parties are large, noisy and places where you come and go with your smaller group. That group solidifies into the folks you spend the balance of your time as house-mates in off-campus housing. The potential offered by the large and diverse student body remains unexplored. In this college as I have seen with others, there is not systematic effort to create connections between people whose paths would never cross in the natural course of events because they are too part apart. 

This is exactly the type of connection that could elevate the college experience and would force young people out of their comfort zone. I was imagining the difference it would make for S and his small group of friends if there was a weekly mixer involving two or three dozen students brought together because they had very little in common. Have them speed network with each other and get comfortable with the format over the course of the first year. Even if each person comes out with two connections they find worth nurturing by the end of the year, it would be a significant accomplishment. Once they get over the discomfort it is likely they would seek and create such opportunities on their own and enrich their college experience even more. It is a pity that the young person is left mostly to their own devices to maximize what college could offer. S is not the only kid that needs a little jump start to get going and all of them are being underserved by these institutions that owe them better.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Reading Shantaram

I finished listening to Shantaram on audiobook after several weekends of being absorbed in the story. This book had been on my to-read list for a long time and I am glad I chose the audio version of it. It is an extraordinary story teeming with colorful characters and rich detail. As an Indian who is a stranger to Mumbai and Maharashtra in that I have never spent years of my life there. I have to rely on what I know second hand. As a fan Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, where in my mind I imagined the action taking place in Mumbai, this book was a chance for me to know the city through another author even if an Australian.  The author,  Gregory David Roberts comes across as someone who is able to see the soul of India through all that ails it. And in connecting with that soul, he finds some answers to his life's hard questions. India does not save him but it keeps his soul alive and striving. Most of his experiences would be unrelatable to the average person who lives a far m...