Compare experiences/relationships high school versus college/grad school

High school is pretty much like that but it almost seems mature while you're in it since you just got used to how bad middle school was.

HS - brutally competitive. GPA figured to 3 significant digits.

Uni - Uncompetitive environment. Very high academic standards. We pursued our own interests.

Grad - first experience w/ a public institution. Was like studying in a cafeteria. Never again.

Conclusion - you pay to associate w/ a certain caliber of people....and reputations generally attract better people.

HS: generally good time, friendly or at least acquaintances with everyone even though I wasn't really part of the popular crowd. Lots more adventures and weird experiences than college or after. School itself was boring.

College: only a few close friends, really didn't have much in common with all the rich kids at my school. All the engineering kids worked together though, so that was cool. Lots of cheaters, though.

Post-college: don't move to a small town across the country, even if it is a good job. Just don't do it.

This thread is not fair to Sanntorum supporters. They can compare their high school experience with what they learned from listening to Rush.

Conundrum wrote:

For me

High School - certainly more superficial relationships...a lot of immaturity....most of the relationship geared toward what you can prove, what group you belong in and what group is having the most fun or is the coolest.....irony of course for me, is that it wasn't really that much fun...much teenage angst.

College - particularly the last couple of years, really bonded with people that cared for each other. You feel like they became your second family and you matured with them. (My first college year was different and weird in that it was like a roller coaster ride)

Grad School - Met the love of my life, my wife, so that was pretty cool. Nice group of people. Politeness with an edge of competition but everyone knew the rules.

Your experiences

I think it all depends on where you go and the type of school you enroll in. But mine went something like this:

High School- Immaturity and people always looking to have fun. Although I still have a few good relationships with high school friends and they were always the friendliest. I guess my graduating class was just a nice group of people to be around (for the most part).

College: Relationships just as superficial as high school, if not more. I think this stems from the fact that everyone is pursuing their own interests. This is good and bad in a way. By the time I graduated college I had my own interests and started pursuing them. That seemed to make some of my other friends mad, who were only interested in drinking every weekend and couldn't get their heads out of their ass. I only hear from a couple of my college teammates anymore on a regular basis, but it really doesn't bother me as I've moved on to other things.

I was pretty much friends with everyone in high school, but didn't have many really close friends. I could pretty much sit down at any lunch table and be accepted, but I didn't make any lifelong friends in high school.

In college, I had a smaller circle of closer friends. I basically had two people that I hung around with all the time. I felt a lot closer to them than I had been to any of my high school friends.

I think that I really learned what friendship is supposed to be about when I got to grad school. While I had felt really close to my undergrad friends, I realized pretty quickly after graduating that those relationships had been more superficial than I'd thought. I tried to maintain those friendships, but it was pretty much "out of sight, out of mind" from their side. Through my first year of grad school, I realized that neither of my undergrad friends were interested in working toward any kind of continued friendship and I eventually gave up on my own efforts. This was honestly a pretty tough thing for me to go through. For years, I'd thought of these guys as brothers and I just kind of assumed that we'd be friends well beyond our college years.

In grad school, I finally found a circle of friends who really cared about each other. It was the first time in my life that I had friends who would go out of their way to do something nice for me without expecting anything in return other than my friendship. If I happened to mention during lunch that I was moving into a new apartment on Saturday, a group of classmates would show up at my place out of the blue on Saturday morning with a borrowed pick-up truck and they'd spend the whole morning helping me move. No need to beg, or even ask, for help. Just people doing nice things for each other out of friendship.

So I guess generally speaking, my relationships have progressively become less superficial through the various stages of my life.

I fvking hate high school, except running