Brandon Wu, Period 8, 6/1/22

 Brandon Wu, Period 8, 6/1/22

I would not call myself a social chameleon who shines in the spotlight of attention. In

reality, I am quite the contrary. You’d be more likely to find me sitting in the corner of the room

rather than in the center of the dancefloor. Whether that can be attributed to my social

awkwardness, anxiety surrounding new social environments, possibly undiagnosed high

functioning autism, or a combination of all of those is anyone’s guess. Long story short, I am an

introvert and terrible at social interaction. But of course, this doesn’t stop me from making new

friends and maintaining relationships, I just have a more difficult time doing so. This problem

culminates into the crux of my problem. I am going off to college next year with many of my old

friends gone and many new faces having to take their place. With few familiar faces going to the

same college as I, my goal for next year is to develop more friendships and better my social

skills. After all, it is said that the friends you make in college are the ones who are going to stick

with you for the rest of your life.

Over the past few years, I would say that I have improved my social skills drastically and

I would like to continue utilizing these techniques to my advantage. Of course, that is not saying

much since I was terribly socially awkward as a kid, but I guess any improvement is a large

improvement. One method that I found helps is to maintain more eye contact with the person I

am speaking with. I used to find eye contact awkward and uncomfortable, but the more I do it,

the easier it is to execute. Not only that, but eye contact helps create a better connection with the

person and makes them understand that you are listening to them. Speaking of listening, I’ve

observed that listening skills are just as important as verbal communication in a conversation.

I’ve found that deeply listening to the conversation can improve a conversation, as I can now ask

more questions regarding the topic to move a discussion along. Despite these incremental

improvements in my communication skills, there is still left to be desired and I hope to develop

those skills in college and throughout my life.

I’ve always wondered how extroverts do it. How are they so confident in front of others?

How can they engage in such fluent conversation that you’d think they were reading Shakespeare

(perhaps that is a slight hyperbole)? I may never know the answers to those questions, but being

surrounded by extroverts everyday of my life truly motivates me as it is a reminder of what I can

become. After all, if they can maintain such a strong social life, surely I can too, especially since

this situation isn’t new to me. I’ve faced this twice already. Once when I graduated elementary

school and a second time when I graduated middle school. Both times, I was able to adapt to my

new surroundings and grew to love the school and the people around me. What makes this

current transition any different? Only time will tell.