The Idea

Moving from Thailand to Australia as an international student, I found it very difficult to make friends with the Australian locals. I lived in a residential college in my first year of University, where the demographic had very little diversity which I found very out of place. I found everyone to be quite friendly, however inside of me I knew that I didn’t fit in and I was trying so hard to get close to them and get to know them on a deeper level, however I believe that due to cultural differences and having a different background, we were never able to click that well. This caused me to feel very lonely and while living in a residential college allowed me to have people around me 24/7, I still felt isolated, and I still feel like it’s something that I can’t really describe and no one really understands. Additionally, I tried to make friends in classes at uni, however I found that it was not as easy like it was in high school, because making friends in uni requires much more effort and consistency and requires a lot of effort from both parties in order for the friendship to flourish. With all the uni work and things getting stressful in general, I just couldn’t be bothered to keep up with it all due to all the energy that it required, so a lot of friendships that were slowly starting to form did not happen. With all of this happening in addition to feeling like I couldn’t properly connect with anyone made me feel like my first year of university was very isolating, which does not match the reality that people tend to see on Instagram, where everyone describes the first year of university as being the best year, as well as the most social year.