It's no great surprise that how well you stay in touch with your friends from home seems to come down to how close you were with your friends in the first place.
Julia Liedel '11, a native of Oregon, has made many good friends at Dartmouth but nevertheless makes the effort to maintain the close friendships she had in high school.
"If I'm here and stressed, I talk to friends from home ... they're my emotional support," Liedel said. "We can't not stay in touch."
While some say, it gets harder to stay in touch with these hometown friends as time goes on, Liedel said she finds that it's actually easier for her and her friends to maintain their relationship this year than it was last year.
"In the beginning, it was like, 'How much are we going to talk to each other? How are we going to check in?' Now it's natural," Liedel said.
Even with such close friends, Liedel sometimes runs into situations where her experiences at Dartmouth don't translate easily to her friends from home.
"Over break, I was telling a story and realized that I had said 'blitz' probably 15 times in three minutes. Or things like flair they might not really get," she said.
However, Liedel saidshe and her friends are close enough that this disconnect doesn't seem to matter.
"I can tell them a story [that they don't relate to] and they'll be like 'Okay cool -- you want to do that, so that's cool,'" she said.
"Maybe sometimes it's hard to explain Dartmouth to my friends from home, but at the same time, it's hard to explain home to my friends from Dartmouth," Liedel said.
Like Liedel, Anna Krigel '09 remains close with her best friends from high school.
"They're still very good friends of mine. Our connections are still very strong and I still care about what's going on in their lives," Krigel said. However, for Krigel, now four years out of high school, it's not as easy as it once was to stay in touch.
"It was easier [to stay in touch] in the beginning of college than it is now," Krigel said. "There was much less separation from the high school world, so it felt more natural. Now it doesn't feel as natural."
Maintaining relationships from home is a challenge for most people who leave high school and go to different colleges. However, going to Dartmouth may add additional hurdles to these high school friendships.
Krigel attributes some of the difficulty of staying in touch to the fact that Dartmouth is not like any other college.
"I think that it's part of the Dartmouth culture. People just get so caught up in the Dartmouth world," Krigel said.
Whether this effect results from the "Dartmouth Bubble," or helps to create it, we seem to have escaped the cliquish days of high school by creating a giant clique of our own.
If you were lucky enough to settle into a friend group in high school, chances are you were relatively happy there -- at least to the extent that you had people to eat lunch with and instant message your crush for you.
But if you're not like Krigel and Liedel, and that's as deep as the connection goes. Let's face it: Sometimes you know you can do better.
Jasper Hicks '12 said that by his senior spring of high school, he was looking forward to the next chapter of his life.
"I was just ready to have a new group of friends and new experiences," he said.
For Hicks, the D-plan made him even more excited to make the transition.
"Since school starts so late, there's a build-up period," Hicks said. "Everybody left and I just got myself really excited to get away from home and come to Dartmouth."
Chris Thomson '12 also came to college accepting that his high school friendships would fade.
"For the friends that I've stayed in touch with so far, it's been effortless and they weren't necessarily the same ones I thought I would have," he said.
Thomson's experience during DOC trips left him feeling very little of the anxiety that sometimes encourages freshman to cling to their high school friends.
"Trips forced me to go out of my comfort zone, since I couldn't talk to my friends from home for five days. I got so close to the people on my trip section that by the time I got back to school I didn't need the security of my friends from home," Thomson said.
"I feel as close with my Dartmouth friends that I've just known since this fall as I do to my friends from home," he said. "College is sort of like time acceleration. Since you spend so much time together, you make friends faster and develop relationships faster."
Reid Greimann '10 from Massachusetts, mirrored Thomson's sentiments.
"I guess I do feel closer with my college friends than I did with my high school friends," he said. "We just don't have the same bond. We all are doing similar things but having different experiences so when we see each other we just end up listing the things we do and not sharing them," he said. "I certainly still do like my friends from home, the context I know my friends in is just different now."
Maybe our favorite home to hang out in hasn't changed since high school, but the absence of a doting mother checking up on us seems to have altered the nature of the relationships we forged there.
Although Greimann has drifted from his friends from home, he still maintains close friendships with people from his summer camp. For Greimann the difference between his friends from home and his friends from camp is the depth of his relationships with them. Although he likes his friends from home, he said, they don't carry the same significance as his friends from camp.
"I've also known them since I was 11. They're very close to me, kind of like my brothers," he said.
Being able to catch up over the summer has helped Greimann and his camp friends remain close.
"[Seeing them over the summer] just refreshes everything," Greimann said. "I think it's good to have something separate from your everyday life that you can remember."
Whether you left high school proudly wearing your half of a "Best Friends Forever" heart necklace, or counted down the days until you could leave your hometown and drop the dead weight, the transition to college has almost certainly changed your existing relationships. Some of us will inevitably repeat this pattern in the future, accumulating more friends or getting tired of the friends we have here, and moving on. One thing's for certain, no matter where we find them, friendships will always be a vital part of our daily lives.
