Freshmen, before you even stepped foot on this campus, you were done a great disservice. There is no need to blame anyone in particular, as this disservice is universal in our higher education system. Regardless, from the minute you began seriously looking into college, in a certain way, you were set up for failure.

Now what is this disservice? It is this apparent truism: As soon as ?you reach campus, you will have many, many friends. A few weeks in, you will have so many choices ?of people to hang out on the weekends that you won’t know where to turn. By the end of the year, you ?will have made your “friends for life,” as they say. You will have found true companionship.

You’re being told this everywhere you turn. Everyone is eating together in the dining halls. Your roommates and neighbors are all going out with each other and other strangers you’ve never seen. Every university’s marketing scheme, every college movie and every older high school friend telling tales about his or her freshman year experience assured you that you would never be alone.

Now why, you might say, is this ?a disservice?

Because it’s not true.

College is not, as it is often conveyed, like the cereal aisle where you have dozens of options to choose from in terms of who you befriend. Really, it is more like one of those claw ?vending machines where you spend lots of time (and money) going for ?specific stuffed animals but are never able to get them.

There are the exceptions, of course. Individuals who were fortunate enough to find themselves plugged in to numerous organizations, where they were literally forced to make friends. But those individuals are not most of us. Most of us found ourselves, as you likely will, at the end of the first semester returning home and wondering why we were so unlikable. Everyone else had seemingly made lots of friends, close friends, even relationships. They’ll post pictures on Facebook saying a temporary goodbye to some person with a little sentimental quote in the caption and it will make you sick, as it did most of us.

The point here is not that you will never make friends – you will. But it will not be as magical and instantaneous as you’ve been led to believe so far. So understand that if you feel lonely, anxious or a little depressed heading home after your first semester of college, you are not alone. It may not look that way, and you may be hard-pressed to believe me, but that is the truth. True friendship will come, but it will take time.

Chisolm Allenlundy is a junior majoring in philosophy and economics. His columns runs weekly ?on Monday.