The Student News Site of Malvern Preparatory School

Friar's Lantern

The Student News Site of Malvern Preparatory School

Friar's Lantern

The Student News Site of Malvern Preparatory School

Friar's Lantern

A week of talking to Friars I’d never met

I spent an entire week using my Community Times to meet new people. Here’s what it was like, and what I learned.

Imagine my surprise when the Editorial Board nominated me to spend a week meeting two new people each day for the Brotherhood Issue. I always like meeting new people, but this seemed like it might be a little stressful.

It was around two weeks before spring break and I had a lot of work I had to get done before I left. Still, I couldn’t resist the chance to meet new people. So, I accepted the challenge and went off on my way from homeroom.

On the first day, I entered the Learning Commons to find people I have never met. The biggest challenge was this: I knew most of the people.

I might not have known everybody super-well, but I knew most people well enough to know their names and a little bit about them. It dawned on me just how many people I have met through Malvern classes, extracurricular activities, and even Family Feud.

I walked up to a random person, sat down, and started talking to him. Most people were kind of relaxed during our conversations. As time went on, I got a little better at making people want to talk, but still the situation was a bit awkward.

I would usually ask the people I talked to around three questions. I would ask “What do you like about Malvern?,” “What kind of extracurricular activities do you do here?,” and something based on their answers to the past two questions like, “Why exactly do you feel that way about Malvern?” or, “What’s your favorite part of that sport?”

Almost everybody I talked to seem kind of unnerved. They did not seem used to people coming up to them and asking them weird questions. Everyone seemed to also want to give safe answers when I told them I might use their name in the newspaper.

An example of this was my first question, “What do you like about Malvern?” Almost all the kids would say something like “the brotherhood.” Now, I mostly talked to freshmen, and I truly feel that the brotherhood haven’t been found for them yet.

There was also another complication when trying to do this experiment: the weather. The week I was supposed to do this, was the week we had two off days because of snow. This made it kind of difficult to really have a long conversation with anybody, as they seemed to be in a hurry.

Because of the lack of people I did not know, the majority of the people I talked to throughout the week were new freshmen. And by doing that, I think I learned something about Malvern students.

Most of the kids I talked to kind of sounded the same. All of them did sports, and all of them said they enjoyed their Malvern experience so far. Other then that, they all seemed a bit reserved in what they wanted to share.

Of course, they could be this way because a goofy and lanky sophomore went up to them out of nowhere and started asking them strange questions like “What is your favorite part of Malvern?”

But, when I look at the freshmen versus the seniors or juniors, I see a real development of character. Most students seem to grow from all being similar, to branching out and becoming unique people.

Though that is probably just a normal function of high school, I think it is pretty cool to see how Malvern leaves its marks on people, and how they may become better people because of it.

Other then that, I don’t have much more to say about my experience. It was fun at times, and super awkward at others. It really depended on what kind of person I was talking to.

I would recommend to any student reading this, to maybe try and go out of your way to introduce yourself to a new person. After all, in a year or three, you will need to do this just about every day as a freshman in college. Even if you go to a school that has lots of Malvern alumni, your brothers will still only be a tiny percentage of your new class.

Though they may seem one way in their current state, I guarantee that each student I met will change as a person sometime during their Malvern experience. When I met students who didn’t have much to share in the more awkward conversations, I found I imagined who these students might become in a year or two, through experiences like the ones I’ve explored as a student. That experience alone is worth the effort of meeting a new person.

 

 

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