Why summer session can feel lonely

Every May, I hear some version of the same thing from students who have just finished the semester: "I have friends. I'm texting everyone. But I feel so alone." This year I've heard it more than usual, and I think I know why.

Campus creates connections automatically. It does this so quietly and so consistently that most students don't notice it until it stops. You're in the same building as your friends without planning it. You bump into people in the hallway, in the dining hall, in the library. You end up in conversations you didn't arrange, with people you weren't expecting to see. That texture of daily proximity — the accidental, unplanned contact — is what campus is actually made of, beneath the classes and assignments and activities.

When the semester ends and everyone disperses, that texture goes with it. A student came to me two weeks after the spring session ended, confused about why she felt so isolated. She had friends back home. She was texting her college friends every day. She had a job starting in June. Everything looked fine. "I keep reaching out," she told me, "but it's just not the same." What she was missing wasn't friends. She was missing the infrastructure that made friendship easy (proximity, repetition, accidental contact generated by the campus).

There's research behind this. A 2024 survey of nearly 44,000 college students by Active Minds found that 57% report feeling lonely, and students who are lonely are more than four times as likely to experience severe psychological distress. (Active Minds, 2024.) This isn't a fringe experience. More than half of students feel it, and when they do, it carries real weight.

The answer isn't to text more or make more plans (though those things can help). The answer is to rebuild infrastructure. One recurring activity that creates proximity without requiring constant arrangement. A class. A standing weekly plan. A volunteer shift. Anything that puts you in the same room with the same people on a schedule you don't have to reinvent every week. My client joined a pottery class not because she was passionate about pottery, but because it was a place she'd be every week. That was enough to start. If you're heading into summer and the quiet already feels heavy, you're not doing friendship wrong. You've just lost the system that made it easy. The work now is finding one anchor. Everything else can grow from there.

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