Making Different Friends: Putting Timidity Aside
By Dario Jose Manuel Garrine ( Petroleum
Engineering, 2nd Year/2nd Semester)
I recall talking
to a good friend of mine few weeks ago about social life in UTP and suddenly hearing
him saying: “whenever I find somebody whom I don’t know and that person greets
me, I know immediately that he is a newcomer”. Sadly I had to agree with that
statement to some degree. It seems that the first days in UTP are the most
social for most of the students. As time passes, UTPians tend to give up on
making new friends and start giving in to timidity. We decide to get attached only
to that small group of friends from our own country, state, home-town or even
race. All the aspiration of having many friends from different background and
learning many things through those friendships is then quenched by the idea that
we are safe when we have friends from similar background as us. However, we
fail to realize that embracing that philosophy might be the closing of a gate
that could lead us to a better perception of life and other things.
Furthermore, having friends from different background can teach us how to deal
with differences, help us getting more interpersonal skills and influence us to
dream higher.
It’s no news
that interpersonal skills play an important role in our lives and carriers, but
did we know friendship can be the key to good interpersonal skills? I mean the
right type of friendship. The type of friendship that places a challenge before
us forcing us to learn how to hear and evaluate new ideas, how to organize our
ideas and speak clearly in a way that everyone understands, how to reject and
have our own ideas rejected and even how to lead, as in those situations where
we give our friends some ideas and they look back at us and say “okay, you show
us”. Yet we see many people taking online courses to acquire skills that can
easily be learned without much effort in their daily lives, by making different
friends.
Friends from
different backgrounds inevitably learn to deal with differences. They learn to
quickly recognize boundaries and respect them. Hence, by the time our
university years come to an end we already know a bit of many kinds of people
and are aware of their sensitive areas. For example if we have a very feminist
friend in university, when we meet another outside the campus we will recognize
them more quickly and know immediately how we should and should not address
certain issues. In this sense, having
friends very different from us makes us wiser in dealing with others similar to
them.
Another great
advantage of having friends from different backgrounds is that they can
influence us to dream higher. That can happen through conversations in which
you get to know about different opportunities that only those friends know
about. It can be a job opportunity that offers a salary that you never thought
of, or it can just be a simple business idea that you think you could have good
chances to implement. Moreover, it’s important to bear in mind that your university
friend today will be professional worker tomorrow and their collaboration can
be very important to you in the future. “Life is box full of surprises”.
Why then do we choose to give in to timidity and close ourselves
from making new different friends and even influence newcomers into the same
path? Isn’t it because of fear and emotional laziness? Fear because all that is
new and different to us raises the question of whether it will work or not and
when we realize the only way to know it is by trying we then give up because we
are afraid to fail. And emotional laziness because we know building friendship
with people from different background from ours inevitably brings us many
challenges due to our cultural differences and we are lazy to deal with all
those emotion that might come along with the challenges. Nevertheless,
overcoming this fear and emotional laziness can render us many advantages.
Life has a lot to teach us and the best way it does so is by others.
It is time for UTPians to realize that socializing more and having more friends
who are different from them (either in ethnic group, state or country) is the
best for them and even safest, considering the era of globalization in which we
live today. So, why should we not put timidity aside and allow ourselves to
have exciting experiences? Why not making new and different friends and getting
the best from our university years?
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