The Case for Stranger Friendships and More Serendipity at Amherst College

As a soon-to-be graduating senior, I have found myself reflecting on my four years at Amherst with increasing intensity over the past few weeks. If I were to pinpoint what has been the most important to me, it would be community. At Amherst, we have a community so close-knit that spontaneous interactions and new mentorship connections are said to be common. But how true is this?

To give some background, I am an international student from Bangalore, India. Bangalore is one of the largest cities in India, with about 15 million people, and is often called the country’s start-up hub. Coming to Amherst was a massive shock; everything from food to culture to weather was different. The small town and, in many ways, lacked the entrepreneurial culture I was used to (shout-out to Alex Nichols ’26 for getting the Ideas 2 Innovation (i2i) venture accelerator started a couple of years ago). However, even as I grew accustomed to the initial culture shocks, one remained: The vastly different social expectations and realities of a small elite liberal arts college than I was used to. 

For the first two years, the more I navigated social life, the more I was confronted with the unspoken aspects of class, race, athlete status, and nationality that interfered with it. You might ask, “well, isn’t that the same everywhere? Why would it be so jarring, particularly at Amherst?” I have grappled with the same question myself, especially when I go back home or study or do summer internships abroad. While my relationships outside Amherst are not entirely different, I initially had to occasionally confront the political nature of love and friendship here. Mainly, I have become aware of these dynamics because most of our social life is limited to this campus, occasionally reaching beyond to other colleges in the consortium. This environment contrasts with the social options available in a city. Don’t get me wrong — I love the Amherst community, and if I could go back, I wouldn’t choose anywhere else to have my undergraduate experience. I really appreciate all the open conversations we are encouraged to have, and the dialogue has felt more empowering here than anywhere else. But that doesn’t mean the social scene here is equal or accessible to everyone in the same way. It is hard for many students to break out of their friend groups.

What do I mean by connections? I mean connections where you go beyond your friend groups and cultivate deep, individual friendships that challenge you and help you grow. I want everyone reading this article to think about or note down where your friendships on this campus come from. Maybe it is from orientation, sports teams, affinity groups, or clubs. But how often do you go out of your way, out of the social situations you have been placed in, to have random conversations with someone after class, in your dorm, or with someone who seems cool? When have you struck up a conversation based on work you have seen at the art gallery, at student showcases, or published in The Student? How often do you get to know the staff at Valentine Dining Hall (Val), Keefe Campus Center, or Frost Library? Even if you do these things often, those random conversations rarely become sustained relationships. People hesitate to reach out to new people they meet to get a meal or to do spontaneous activities like taking a walk on the Norwottuck Rail Trail at sunrise, cycling to Flayvors of Cook Farm, trying new boba at Miss Saigon, collaborating on a project outside class, or passionately debating complex ideas like the new threat of artificial intelligence.

These random interactions and activities, which should happen often and shift your point of reference in the emotional and physical world ever so slightly, have been so sparse in my time at Amherst. To me, it seems that there is a culture here where even though people are initially open-minded in exploration, they often tend to stick with what might make them comfortable: yes, in friends, but also in terms of classes, internships, and more. Risk-taking in social life is particularly rare. People go to Val with the same friend groups and sit at similar tables. Some spaces carry more social weight than others: certain teams, certain clubs, certain parties. The friend groups inside them tend to run them, and the terms of entry are set quietly, often without anyone meaning to. It's a comfortable space for the people inside it, and sometimes a harder one to read from the outside. There could be many reasons why this is the case: lack of time due to stressful assignments, fear of rejection, and hesitations about whether you could connect with someone so different from you. Or more simply, you just want to spend more time with the people you already love and have developed deep friendships with. If that is the case, I totally understand. But this article is for those who want more, who want friendships that expand their minds and hearts, connecting them with many more people across campus. This should come easily to students here, who have been trained across the open curriculum to repeatedly learn to think in new ways, connecting different fields and reflecting on issues from various vantage points with people in small groups. 

My Attempts at Solving This and How You Can Do It Too

I will now briefly chart my journey of trying to fix this connection problem at Amherst. The reason for this is that I want the underclassmen (and any future Amherst students) to make an active effort to prioritize community and an entrepreneurial spirit on campus. One way to do this is to join the Association of Amherst Students (AAS), which has been one of my favorite ways to spend time on campus. You learn what is happening across campus and debate the various approaches to solve problems that arise within the community. The senators have access to funds and faculty committees to implement those solutions. I joined the Senate Junior fall (which felt late at the time, but is really not!) and made this connection issue my main focus. 

The first issue I recognized was the frustration of not having one central place to find out what’s happening at Amherst. I strongly felt that events might be a great way to meet new people and build sustained connections, as I have been advocating for in this article. While the Daily Mammoth, the Hub, and other sources provide valuable information, they’re scattered and inconsistent. I wanted to change that by creating a single platform to bring everything together: on a map, a weekly calendar, and a dashboard that highlights popular locations and times. So I began working on the website Amherst Connect with help from the engineering team at i2i. It was difficult to build the project and go through the long launch process, but it has been so gratifying to hear from students who say they found events, opportunities, and friendships they would have otherwise missed.

In addition, last semester, I started ValPact, which also attempts to tackle this problem head-on. Val is where most of our social catch-up happens: gossip, fight resolutions, and general discussions about how our days went. (I wish we had a way to anonymously see and graph the range of emotions and topics discussed at Val over the years!) ValPact asks students to answer two questions: Which class year do you want to pair with, and how often? It matches strangers based on these two preferences, and once students have completed three meals at Val, their fourth meal in town is funded by the AAS. ValPact matches send me selfies after their meals, which has honestly brought me so much happiness this year. I occasionally also see those students hang out with each other in other places. That was exactly what I hoped this project would do: show the power of a new conversation at Val. 

Recently, Rebekah Hong ’26 and I also began working on Senior Voices to help collect stories from seniors about their formative experiences at Amherst through journals placed across campus. We hope to compile these accounts into a digital magazine by graduation. I am excited to see how this project will reflect opportunities to connect on campus and even encourage students to seek unconventional bonds.    

I am only describing my projects to show that, while it can be challenging and a lot of work, there is a range of technical and non-technical projects that can help the community, which anyone can take up. Once you identify a problem, you can collaborate with and request funding from clubs, department coordinators, alumni, and librarians, and even ask for their support in spreading the word. Often, you don’t even need permission to launch things! 

Before coming to Amherst, I had never been outside of India. I was one of the first people at my school to apply to colleges abroad because I was sick of the Indian education system, which encourages narrowing down your intellectual curiosity and only studying for exams. I spent the end of my high school and gap year researching education systems abroad, working on projects, and completing online internships (due to Covid-19) with people from all over the world. That was the first time I was truly exposed to different cultures (outside of media) and realized how much I loved developing deep relationships with strangers. It changed the way I look at the world and helped me reevaluate my connection with my own culture. While it was scary at first, I began working on apps and other projects with people I met online.

Since coming to Amherst, I have had the amazing privilege of traveling to 13 other countries, many of which were funded by Amherst and other fellowships. Whenever I travel, I try to stay in hostels and strike up conversations with random strangers in the common room. Often, these conversations become adventures, like cycling through Barcelona for two days with three people from Croatia, Chile, and Lithuania, or waking up at 4 a.m. to go hiking in Kyoto with two people from the Netherlands and Belgium, whom I met the night before. Last summer, I decided to do an internship in Kenya. I didn’t know where I would be living, even 2-3 weeks before I left for Nairobi. While perusing the options on a few Facebook groups, I came across a community house. After a video call and a few text messages, I paid the rent and went to the house as soon as I landed. That choice was one of the best decisions I could have made. I lived with four people in their thirties, all of whom had been living internationally before coming to Kenya. Every weekend, we would spontaneously invite people from around Nairobi to cook, play games, come have tea, and chat into the night by the fireplace. I met new people all the time and became comfortable truly giving in to curiosity and care for the other people. Often, I also found ways to collaborate on cool initiatives with these strangers. When I returned to Kenya in January to conduct ethnographic research for my thesis, I sought out and developed these connections again to make them stronger. 

I hope these examples simply highlight that my best conversations and projects have often come from spontaneity and a word I really like: serendipity. I don’t see it as much at Amherst as I would like. I hope this article helps create more serendipitous moments at a very special and beautiful place: Amherst.