Making friends during a forced group game.
MAKING FRIENDS DURING A FORCED GROUP GAME.
Follow us for more dives into the traditions that shaped our Ivy experience.
Remember those first few days? A dizzying blur of new faces, overwhelming expectations, and the unspoken pressure to "find your people." Before the late-night study sessions, there was orientation. And within orientation, there were the group games – those meticulously planned icebreakers designed to transform strangers into a bonded cohort. You know the ones: the human knot, two truths and a lie, or an elaborate scavenger hunt where team success hinged on deciphering obscure campus lore.
I recall the internal monologue vividly: "Just don't make eye contact. Look engaged, but not too eager. Who decided this?" We’d all arrived, brilliant and ambitious, yet reduced to awkward teenagers fumbling with oversized name tags. The air was thick with a shared, unspoken desire to impress, juxtaposed with the real, primal need for connection. Then, someone would crack a joke, or genuinely struggle, and a ripple of shared humanity would break through. That’s when the magic happened. Forced smiles morphed into genuine grins, polite nods into conspiratorial whispers.
It wasn’t always a lifelong friendship forged over a silly game. Sometimes it was just a fleeting moment of camaraderie, a shared eye-roll, or the discovery that the person next to you also secretly hated charades. But in those moments, the facade dropped. We saw each other not as future leaders or academic rivals, but as fellow travelers on a daunting, thrilling new path. Looking back, these traditions we sometimes loved to hate, were ultimately threads in the rich tapestry of our first year. They taught us to navigate vulnerability, find humor in discomfort, and often, were catalysts for deep connections. What’s your most memorable forced group game story?