When I came to Pitt way back in 2021, I had grand fantasies of the first month of my college classes. I would sit down in my intro courses, peering around the large lecture halls with curious eyes. My classmates, naturally intrigued by my determined yet approachable demeanor, would introduce themselves, and thus would begin many lifelong friendships.
I am now a senior, and I have made many fulfilling and hopefully lifelong friendships. And how many of those did I make in my classes? Absolutely zilch.
You certainly can and should try and befriend some of your classmates. It’s possible I would have made a few pals if my daydreams focused more on me approaching other people and less on other people flocking to me while I put in no effort to nurture a friendship. But regardless of your success in the classroom, I cannot stress enough the importance of finding a club or organization you’re excited about.
I have my extracurriculars here at Pitt to thank for my best friends, my career goals and a fairly significant part of my education.
On the surface, a club meeting and a weekly class are essentially the same thing — a group of students meeting in the same room for a certain amount of time to engage in some shared interest. There’s a very key difference, though, that makes it much easier to make a new friend at a club meeting. People go to a morning recitation because they have to. They go to a club meeting because they want to.
Your classmates will all be lovely people, but it’s a bit of a coin toss whether the guy sitting next to you has the same passion for the course that you do or if he’s showing up against his will to complete a gen ed requirement. The people at a club meeting are there voluntarily, either driven by their enjoyment of a certain subject or by their desire to make new friends. You can see how this might be a promising environment to meet people.
I had the pleasure of joining Pitt’s best and only late-night talk show Pitt Tonight my first semester here. There’s a lot of value in leaving your dorm door open or going to your hall bonding events, but nothing has brought me closer to a group of people than workshopping jokes and doing bits for an hour and a half twice a week. Finding something you like even a little bit and surrounding yourself with people who like it too will give you better friends than you could ask for.
My clubs have also given me more career direction than any of my classes or advisers have. Please use your advisers — they are there specifically to help you figure out what to do with your life — but at the same time, no one understands the looming specter of post-grad plans like other college students in the exact same boat.
When I came to Pitt, I had no clue whatsoever what I wanted to do. Politics was interesting, and I liked to write. I pursued a major in politics and philosophy with a minor in creative writing, and while I have had many fascinating classes, none of them really gave me an idea of what to do with the education I was getting.
Enter extracurriculars. Pitt Tonight taught me that I love comedy, which is a very awful thing to learn when trying to figure out a financially responsible career plan. I joined The Pitt News as a columnist my sophomore year and learned that I liked being part of a newsroom — a slightly better thing to learn. I quickly realized I really liked to write, no matter the format, and one night at 2 a.m., in a crisis over what my life would become, I decided to pursue English writing as a major instead of a minor.
Last year, I opened my relationship with TPN’s opinions desk and dipped my toes in some reporting for our culture desk. Despite my general introversion, I enjoyed going to events and conducting interviews, and the news journalism chapter of my career track has now led me to a summer internship reporting for Pittsburgh’s NPR station, 90.5 WESA.
The clubs you join and the people you meet there will help you decide what you want to do, and if you already know what you want to do, they’ll help you achieve it. Along with the friends and the advice, extracurricular activities also give you specialized education for free.
Participating in clubs taught me how to write a script, film a digital sketch, edit video and audio, organize a news story, lead a meeting, manage a website and act onstage for a crowd.
I have taken one single introductory course in nonfiction writing, but the experiential learning I’ve received in TPN’s newsroom has eventually landed me, microphone in hand, outside the barricade at Pitt’s second pro-Palestine encampment, in the press box at a Biden-Harris rally and inside the David L. Lawrence convention center for Anthrocon’s largest turnout to date.
I have not taken any screenwriting, film or acting classes yet, but my writing and my person have appeared on the stage and on YouTube for Pitt Tonight countless times. The incredibly ambitious and funny people I have met there have given me the opportunity to make fake headlines for a new satire page, feature a verse on an upcoming rap album and raze my vocal cords scream-singing as Charlie Day for a play in the Frick Fine Arts auditorium.
You’ll learn a lot from your classes, but I’d venture to say you might double your education here simply by joining the right clubs. People want to share their skills with you, and an active organization is the best place to find very skilled and passionate people.
To all the new students at Pitt this year — go to the activities fair and find some clubs that seem interesting. It’s not a permanent commitment. You can go to a meeting and never come back if you want, but hopefully even just one or two will stick.
When you’ve found a group that feels right, it won’t take long for you to make great friends and find a new passion to sink countless hours of your next four years into.
Thomas Riley is the opinions editor for The Pitt News and thinks it would be pretty cool if you decided to apply to be a columnist. Email them at [email protected]
