Building & Managing Relationships in College

I attended this workshop on October 8, 2009 at 12:45 pm. The workshop was mainly about giving advice to students on how to build and maintain familial, friendly, romantic, and business relationships. The advisor of the workshope presented the overall view of when people maintain or lose relationships by presenting the psychologist Erik Erikson. Erikson said that when people are bewteen 18 and 35 years old, there is a battle between intimacy and isolation. Those who are able to affiliate easily and have a love for people are more easily accessible to build relationships with strangers. During the workshop, it was also described that family is the base for building future relationships. It was said that college is a time when there are more adult roles and responsibilities and it is the point when students have to start negotiating adult responsibilities and boundaries as they are growing older. During the section of friendships, it was explained that as we enter college, we should not limit ourselves, be more open, and not just stick to our friendships from high school. Friendships in college are known to be long lasting and also help with newtorking after graduation. When it comes to business relationships, we shoule get out of our comfort zone and build relationships with our professors, internship supervisors, and professional colleagues because they are also an important part of networking when it comes to getting recommendations and finding jobs. The last section was romantic relationships. What was discussed was that it helps people with the development of communication between people, how to maintain “healthy” boundaries between our boyfriend/girlfriend/partner; it would help people know how to deal with breakups and not let it lead to a disaster. Each romantic relationship was said to show the progress of a person growing maturily. This workshop did go out of my comfort zone because I was exposed to meeting new people that were around me and I am a very shy person, so I don’t make friends so easily. I would recommend this to anyone else because I think most of us do not really know what the purpose/goals of our different relationships are and it would help us grow much better as a person. What I can take away from the workshop that was new to me was that relationships are not coincidence, they are there for a reason. They help us grow, learn, and help others to become better people to others and to ourselves. 🙂