Everyone likes to think that there aren’t really cliques in school, that everyone can be friends with who ever they want but in reality that’s just not the case. Going through school I had never seen so many cliques. I’ve been told that is simply not the case everywhere but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Cliques started for me in Elementary school. I remember going to lunch and each of the tables already being predetermined. There were the girly girls that always sat at one end of the table closest to the window, there were the girls that all lived down the street from each other that sat at the other end of the same table. Then there was the table which had all the geeky boys, another table that had all the troublemaker boys, then there were the sporty boys, and then there was the outcast table. Yes, there was an outcast table in Elementary school. All the kids that sat there were the ones that weren’t really part of any group. The boys that sat their were either not “smart” enough or didn’t get into enough trouble and the girls that sat there were tomboys.

I remember being kicked out of the girly girl table, then being excluded from the other table full of girls. It was almost like a scene from Mean Girls. I was somewhat of a tomboy growing up and the girly girls were not having any part of it. They made fun of my clothing just because I thought skirts and dresses were the devil and pink wasn’t my favorite color. So like any kid, I tried to make friends with the other girls. They weren’t having it either just because they lived in an exclusive area of town. So I only had one place to go, the outcast table and there I stayed for a while.

When I got to college I wanted to believe that the cliques would be nothing like those through all of “lower” education and at first it really seemed that way. Freshman year was just a struggle to make friends but almost everyone was fair game. No one knew anything about each other but as the year went on things changed. People started to form grudges and learned more about why type of person their “friend” actually was. Large friend groups dwindled down to just a few people, and then new cliques were formed.

College cliques are definitely different than those of younger years. In college its by far easier to be accepted into a friend group simply because us college students meet more people. Groups grow and shrink all the time depending on where people have classes, if they live on campus and lots of other reasons. People often just need to know one person in the friend group to be accepted and that makes things far easier.

There are still, and I think always will be, groups of people that just are not accepting no matter what. I’ve taken classes where other students will talk to me in class but the second we leave the classroom there isn’t even a point to try to talk to them. You don’t play a sport? You can’t sit with us. You don’t live in my building? Don’t even bother trying to talk to me. Some people are just totally unapproachable and refuse to interact with those that they don’t know. Being around so many different people has made it painfully clear as to who you can and can not even try to be friends with.