11 - Leaving Virtuality

I am a junior. When I was a sophomore one of my best friends from back home asked me talk to talk to his cousin who was thinking of coming to Cornell. She had no idea what she wanted to study and had a lot of questions she wanted to ask me about Cornell. She started asking endless questions on Facebook about how hard the school was, what the dorms were like, and how the parties were. I tried to answer her as truthfully as possible.

As it turned out I most likely scared her away from coming to Cornell because she ended up at the University of Maryland. Even though she ended up not coming to Cornell I talked to her a lot at the beginning of first semester last year. We seemed to get along and have a lot of the same interests even though I had never met her in person. As the semester went on, we talked less and less. We barely talked after first semester until one day during last summer she messaged me. Apparently she had decided that she did not like UMD and was transferring to Cornell. Suddenly with the possibility of face to face contact, we started talking to each other a lot more. We talked all summer and weirdly enough when we got to school, we did not see each other for the first 2 months here. Neither of us was ever able to make time to meet up with the other. Once we met in person, we became much better friends. She introduced me to a bunch of other transfers she had met here and we all started hanging out a lot.

My experience best fits with the Uncertainty Reduction Theory. Before we had met in person, our conversations were fairly superficial and we only talked about random things at school. Once we met and got to know each other in person, we became more comfortable with each other and much better friends. Before we met in Ftf, our conversations fell somewhere between CFO and SIP, while we did get to know each other better over time, it never compared to Ftf. Once we met in person we were much closer.