My mom, who attended college in the early ‘90s, scribbled out a couple of letters a semester to her high school friends — if that. 

College has always been the quintessential time to reinvent, pursue, and most of all, socialize ad nauseam. Don’t like who you were in high school? Didn’t like your friends? Go to college — reinvent the wheel!

Today, though, this sentiment feels less present. We have become comfortable, almost too attached, to the friendships made early on in childhood.

The college experience will never be as immersive today as it was in our parents’ day — perhaps the millennials were the last to reap the benefits of the university bubble. 

The so-called “college bubble” that college students contractually enter when they accept their admission to school has been romanticized throughout the media extensively. It’s almost always an expectation that people peak in their college years, and spend the rest of their lives reminiscing. 

So, why does college no longer feel like we’re living a movie?

At least 97% of college-aged students today own a smartphone, and almost all of them bring that device everywhere with them, like an extension of themselves. 

While nobody is suggesting we all band together and throw our phones in the Charles River — though I would be lying if I said the thought had not crossed my mind a couple of times — it is the staunch reality that social media is changing the college experience.

With constant connection to the internet, we are absorbed in two worlds at once. The first: trying our best to branch out, join new clubs, make new friends and thrive academically. The second: our parents, friends from home, mutuals on our socials, updating Instagram stories — the list goes on. 

Depending on how you choose to split it, much of your world at college exists through screens. In some ways, this provides a false sense of security, or a sedentary position of comfort.

The consequence of constant access to iMessage, FaceTime, Snapchat and so on, is that it has become much easier to maintain relations. Though we may not see our hometown folk for months on end, they are only a couple of taps away. Points of access are right at our fingertips.

Is this preventing us from taking full advantage of the opportunities college has to offer? 

Sure, we’re here to learn, earn degrees and make gains towards the professions we want to pursue. But college is supposed to be the “best time of our lives,” or so we’ve heard a million times over. 

With the invention of smartphones and social media, the college experience will never be the same. Organic, run-in connections are so few and far between today. 

It takes time and effort to maintain every relationship we’ve made in our comparatively short lives so far. Friends come and go, as the saying goes.

Social media fosters connections, but more importantly, plays a significant role in helping to maintain them. According to the Pew Research Center, 83% of teens feel better connected to their friends’ lives due to social media. Relationships are kept and maintained longer in the current day of Instagram and Facebook. 

I argue that maybe — just maybe — this is a bad thing. Humans aren’t meant to live forever, and neither are friendships. 

Though I cannot generalize to an entire generation, when my parents stood in my shoes, they only put effort into the relationships they each felt were worth keeping, and isn’t that the way it should be?

The ease we can and often do maintain connections today is holding us back from the possibility of everyone new that could take up space in our lives, especially at this juncture. 

It’s hard to face the reality that your childhood friends might be holding you back if you let them. Keep the connections worth keeping — which often won’t feel like effort at all, if they’re meant to be — and put the phone down for some real face-to-face connection.

It’s harder and harder to find these days, but glimpses of the past and the way college used to be still exist if we commit to the ‘90s mentality.