As a senior, I’ve come to the point where I can reflect on my Northwestern experience and think about some of its best parts. To incoming students, I offer one piece of advice: get to know people with different interests from your own.

One of the key reasons I chose to come to Northwestern was its status as a university that attracts students from all over the world. I wanted to meet people not just with similar backgrounds to my own, but also students who had very different perspectives. In my opinion, that is one of the great benefits of college in general, and Northwestern is full of people with unique interests.

Passion is a word that is thrown around often, but I truly think that students at Northwestern tend to be passionate about something. I myself am interested in conservation; Taylor and Ava who also write for this blog are passionate about the environment and sports journalism, respectively. I have met people passionate about creating films, appreciating new cultures, building cars from scratch, making music, and working towards social change. Now, I could have just found everyone at Northwestern interested in conservation and made some sort of weird bubble with only that select group of people. Instead, I branched out and met people with all of these different interests and then some. These people have enriched my college experience. They’ve made it more rewarding. Plainly, they’ve made it better. In my opinion, that is the way to do it.

Luckily, my advice is not hard to follow. You have plenty of opportunities to meet new people all the time. I already mentioned the people in my dorm in a previous post, but there are countless ways to connect with people very interested in things that perhaps you have never even heard of; be it through taking new classes, joining new clubs, or just getting involved in something on campus. Please go and meet those people at Northwestern. You won’t regret it.

–Jason Smith