Leaving the confines of a hometown or a group of friends for the next step in school can pose a problem for more mature students.
To combat this problem, Quinn Blue, coordinator of the Pride Centre, decided to assist students in the process of making friends with a game called “speed friending” on Nov. 1 as a part of Campus Pride Week.
Speed friending works very much in the same way as speed dating. Each person speaks to one another with only a few minutes to answer a specific question given. They are to first state their name and pronoun and then get to the nitty-gritty of hitting it off.
Blue lets everyone know when to move along to the next person until eventually, everyone had a chance to talk.
“At the end of it, they can choose to say ‘yes I want to continue talking to this person in the future’, and if they say that then I will exchange contact info on behalf of all those who’ve mutually accepted,” said Blue.
The process is made to be fully mutual and creates an environment with no pressure to have a conversation with people in the same community.
Lexxi Dafoe, a first-year early childhood education student, thought it’d be a good chance for her to get in contact with people from the college and start making friends.
“I don’t have a lot of friends in school yet,” said Dafoe. “It’s my first year living on my own and I wanted to make more friends because this seemed like an after class event, so I’d think more people live in residence so I would make more residence friends.”
Blue stated that the busiest time for these events are at the beginning of the year when first-year students are trying to expand their social group.
Making new friends can be hard, but with a fun game to encourage a platonic way to meet new people of all ages and of any study, it can make it a lot easier. Within minutes of this event, the once quiet room turned into a thunder of chatter and laughter.