Making the "Right" Friends

Making friends in school is difficult. That much anyone can attest to. What's even more difficult however, is making the right kind of friends. The right friends to make in school are ones that will help you study and you can help study in return. Essentially, the best friend to make in school is someone who has a similar GPA or a similar outlook on how to handle school.

As your school career gets longer, you'll be asked to read and write more and more and more to the point where if you have a job in addition to going to school, it will not be physically possible to read all the required material and write every essay at the required length while also maintaining a social life.

In secondary school, the key to succeeding is to make friends who share similar classes and teachers. While I always encourage people to make friends with as many social groups as possible, it doesn't very much help you to befriend athletes or people in the school band if you don't share classes with them and you are looking for a study partner.

In a collegiate setting, befriending people who share your major is imperative. While discussing your passion for a subject is nice, what is even more advantageous is the prospect of picking and choosing classes based on students who will help you succeed. Of course, within every major you will find people who simply want to graduate with minimal effort and other people who want to graduate at the top of the class. For this reason, you should not study with people who do not share a similar outlook on school or its purpose. The results you get are minimal at best and you could even lower your grade by studying with people who are not as good students as you are.

The TV show Community uses the narrative of the study group to demonstrate people from different lifestyles and outlooks on education. The Spanish study group becomes one about a group of students teaming up to tackle Professor Chang's impossible Spanish class. Jeff and Britta make up the "slacker" mentality, Annie and Abed make up the "studious" mentality, Shirley and Pierce make up the "fun" mentality, and Troy is the wild card that is pulled around by the different factions. On average, the study group has probably a 2.99 GPA mentality. I would estimate that based on their personalities and reasons for going to school, Annie is a 4.0 student, Abed is a 3.75, Shirley is a 3.49, Pierce is a 3.0, Troy is a 2.5, Britta is a 2.25, and Jeff is (intentionally) a 2.0 student. Because they study together, ultimately Britta does better in school, but Annie does much worse. This is not a successful study group by any stretch and should never be the model followed by students!

Ultimately, you should do what works best for you. If something isn't working, try something else! If you keep repeating the same method and do not get different results, odds are that you will continue to get undesired results.