{"id":3081,"date":"2012-08-03T00:20:11","date_gmt":"2012-08-03T07:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ups.edu\/studentlife\/?p=3081"},"modified":"2012-08-03T00:20:11","modified_gmt":"2012-08-03T07:20:11","slug":"coffee-dates-pt-iv-the-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/2012\/08\/03\/coffee-dates-pt-iv-the-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Coffee Dates Pt. IV \u2013 The End"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sorry for the really, really late blog post, but this is the last one I\u2019ll do, so I wanted to make it comprehensive and conclusive. If you haven\u2019t read about my personal challenge to get 75 coffee dates with new people in three months, you can read it here<\/a>. The deadline was the Wednesday of finals week. I finished with 63 official coffee dates.<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t finish with 63 because only 63 people wanted to have coffee with me. Rather, I finished with 63 because I didn\u2019t have enough time. If I had more non-academic time to dispose of, I would have easily been able to meet my goal. You see, I kept two important lists in my little moleskine: People who agreed to have coffee with me, and people who I\u2019ve had coffee with. In the past three months, I never missed the opportunity to rekindle dying friendships and meet brand new people, and my \u201cto-do\u201d list grew to 94 contacts. This means that 31 people on my \u201cto-do\u201d list had agreed to have coffee with me, but could not because either our timing or schedules just didn\u2019t work out.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So why did I do it? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Obviously it wasn\u2019t to make as many new long-lasting friends as possible. I was about to graduate and move to San Diego for graduate school, and I knew that I would probably never see half these people again. However, I do plan on staying in touch with some of the people I\u2019ve met, either via Facebook, coming back to visit as a proud Puget Sound alum, or other. One of my coffee contacts, for example, is one of the main actors in a short film, and I plan to go up to see it at the Seattle International Film Festival.<\/p>\n

But again, I never intentionally planned on making 75 new BFFs in three months. No. There was a reason why I challenged myself to do this coffee date project.<\/p>\n

As you might have gathered from my past blog posts, I am genuinely interested in meeting new and different people. They teach me something new and show me a different perspective to everything. Before I came to Puget Sound (and even before I had even started applying to colleges) I had already envisioned my ideal college experience. It included meeting new people, learning from their experiences, having challenging discussions, and growing and maturing in a way that only a college campus can foster.<\/p>\n

I’m sure I’m not alone in expecting this, there must be others who expect the same thing out of college. But how often does this expectation become a reality?<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

The real reason why I did this coffee challenge was to show to the rest of my community that Puget Sound is safe environment to meet new people, even after cliques have been formed (see disclaimer at bottom). You’re not stuck with the friends you already have. It’s never too late to meet new people and make new friends. Even a radical and straightforward method–such as directly asking strangers for a coffee date–will work. I embarked on this coffee challenge and blogged about it so that the unknown can now be known: Someone at Puget Sound has challenged himself to meet a ton of new people and he hasn’t been stoned to death.<\/p>\n

Looking back<\/strong><\/p>\n

What a wild ride it\u2019s been. After three months of meeting new people and steadily stepping further and further outside of my comfort zone, I can say that my experience has been both enlightening and exhausting. I\u2019m feeling a sense of belonging to the overall Puget Sound community that I haven\u2019t felt for a long time. This is the sense of small, close-knit community that Puget Sound boasts, and I\u2019m feeling it now.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned more outside<\/em> the classroom than I\u2019ve have inside<\/em> it, and the majority of what I learned outside the classroom is what I\u2019ve learned from other people and their experiences. I\u2019ve had several coffee dates that I wished didn\u2019t have to end. From one coffee date, I learned about religion and spirituality, and about his experience living at a Buddhist monastery before coming to college (this guy seriously seemed like an endless well of wisdom). From another, I learned about the challenges of leadership, and about his experience with doing what is right versus doing what is popular.\u00a0 One of my more recent coffee dates told me about her experience living in Tanzania, about her experience living in a culture where she has never felt such sense cooperation and collectivity, and about her transition coming back to a highly individualized culture.<\/p>\n

The Black Student Union recently established a new publication on campus called \u201cBlack Ice\u201d (which you can download\u00a0here<\/a>), and its tagline is\u00a0\u201cStudying abroad on my own campus.\u201d\u00a0I found that this tagline resonated with my coffee date challenge. I, regretfully, never took the opportunity to study abroad, so I never immersed myself in something unfamiliar. But nonetheless I found that I could still immerse myself in the many microcosms of perspectives on my own campus.<\/p>\n

So, I\u2019ve taken on the personal challenge of meeting 75 new people in three months, and now I charge you with a similar one. Whether you are an incoming freshman or an incoming senior, I challenge you to meet 10 brand new people this semester and every semester to come. You can learn a lot from someone in 12 oz. of brewed goodness.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer pertaining to all four of my blog posts: <\/strong>I do not intend to pin the “social awkwardness” as a distinct characteristic of Puget Sound.\u00a0Rather, it is a generalization that I am making of society in general. Additionally, I do not\u00a0intend to ever imply that Puget Sound is overly cliquey; forming cliques is socially natural and is a human tendency we all succumb to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sorry for the really, really late blog post, but this is the last one I\u2019ll do, so I wanted to make it comprehensive and conclusive. If you haven\u2019t read about my personal challenge to get 75 coffee dates with new … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[95,96,149,210,223,268,341],"class_list":["post-3081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-westley-dang-12","tag-coffee","tag-coffee-dates","tag-friends","tag-life","tag-making-friends","tag-people","tag-student-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/241"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}