Tucked between a stack of orientation materials that every incoming first-year receives is a promising number — 800+ and counting. To first-years, that number represents the sheer breadth of Contracted Independent Organizations that the University offers, a seemingly boundless array of opportunities for connection and belonging. However, this number omits one crucial caveat — within the University’s current social culture, connection seems to be driven by purpose and optimization, rather than by belonging. Somewhere between students striving to be the best and CIO leaders creating more and more opportunities to meet that ambition, a specific subset of club culture has crowded out any room for casual friendships, interactions and moments at the University.
This disconnect is not a simple cultural accident, but rather a reflection of the University’s focus on scale over community. 800+ CIOs is a statistic that the University can market, expand and measure — a metric with its own infrastructure of funding, involvement and coordination. However, that infrastructure tends to crowd out whatever it was not designed to hold, including unstructured, unplanned and low-stakes social interactions between students. In their place is a culture obsessed with structured, purpose-driven socializing. The University has built countless systematic, resume-oriented paths to network your way into knowing people, but has forgotten the value of just hanging out — the very thing that changes four years from a transactional experience into a formative one.
Students at the University have adopted the transactional, hierarchical culture built into recruiting cycles and CIO applications — a culture reinforced by the fact that competitive programs like the McIntire School of Commerce weigh co-curricular involvement in admissions. Students treat clubs as a direct pipeline into these programs. At their core, clubs like these could function as the University’s most natural social infrastructure — a group of people who share common interests, have space to engage outside of a classroom and need no additional effort to meet besides attending. But the perception of clubs as a pipeline is enough on its own to transform resume-building workshops, practice interview rounds and other tools from a casual, social space to a transactional one.
In reality, professionally oriented socializing ties interactions to the activity itself rather than the person — every interaction has a stated purpose, so once that purpose is fulfilled, the interaction between two individuals ends. Consider a club recruitment cycle. Serious, lasting friendships rarely emerge from multiple interview rounds that are designed to test competence.
Real closeness tends to stem from somewhere less deliberate and calculated. Repeated and unplanned interactions are where sociologists have identified real friendships to grow. The roommate’s friend who stays in your dorm a little bit longer, the person you have sat next to in class four days in a row, the barista who takes your order every morning at Grit — these are the crucial moments lost by a culture focused only on optimizing every interaction.
These unstructured interactions matter because loneliness has become the default experience for students across the nation — more than 60 percent have reported feeling lonely or out of place. To combat that number, universities have hyperfocused on ways to structurally increase student interaction. However, that common response to student loneliness — building more structure — is, counterintuitively, part of what perpetuates it. It treats loneliness as a supply problem, reinforcing the idea that connection needs a stated purpose to exist. Unremarkable, repeated closeness that turns strangers into friends is impossible to replicate during a meeting about consulting recruiting or a practice interview.
This is not an indictment of pre-professional clubs. The training, skills and experiences they create are indispensable, and even relationships they initially cultivate as transactional can mature into lasting mentorship or real friendships. However, the culture these clubs have normalized seeps outward into the larger social life of this University and many others, displacing casual friendships and bonds. Consider national drinking rates among college students, which have decreased by 30 percent over the past almost 40 years. The decline itself is not a negative thing — but rather, a visible symptom of a generation growing increasingly wary of unstructured and unpredictable social situations. There is no need to optimize every second, schedule every plan to the last minute or know every single person within a 15-foot radius. Building a resume, managing one’s time and developing professional skills is not the issue — the issue is forgetting what it means to simply hang out with others without strings attached.
For students, incoming or current, the lesson is simple — not every social interaction needs a purpose or reason. To the University, the best solution is to — surprisingly — get out of the way. Prioritize protecting time and space where students can simply exist alongside each other. Specifically, this could look like resisting the urge to schedule every single hour of orientation. It could look like encouraging CIOs to push recruitment a few weeks later into the semester. Or, it could look like preserving and supporting common spaces across Grounds as places to linger rather than pass through.
Pre-professional clubs and the culture that they have created are not going away. Attending a university like our own comes with that kind of pressure — and, in many ways, that pressure is a privilege. However, attention is owed to the connections that are lost along the way. Belonging does not have an application deadline, and it is time to stop treating it as if it did. Somewhere on a calendar, there is still a blank space. Fill it with nothing in particular.
Lucy Duttenhofer is a senior associate opinion editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the authors alone.
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