Campus communities were my life! I built my first computer with guys from the computing center, the LGBT student group, I wrote for a couple campus newspapers, i joined student government and spent most of my free time screwing around on computers. I'd say the campus communities had way more of an impact on me than coursework.

I'm still in touch with the people that I worked with, and a couple people from student government. I keep tabs on the folks that I wrote for papers with, but we've all gone separate ways.

I have no regrets for the crazy amount of time I spent, the lack of sleep or how my grades suffered. Totally 100% worth it.

Most of the time I wasn't studying I was wrapped up in various student societies— there was the Christian Union (UHCU and then CICCU), and Poohsoc, and CUHaGS. Most of them provided some level of grounding, especially UHCU in that otherwise large and amorphic university. Looking back, I suppose I regret spending time on Christian Union stuff to the exclusion of other things; I was told by someone I respected that Christians "should" get involved in the CU, believed it, and then forgot to do much else. So yes, they were rather an insulated clique.

On the other hand, I have no regrets about CUHaGS or Poohsoc: they're fine societies at which I had happy times and learned many interesting things.

I'm not sure any of these societies really felt like coming home, and I doubt any of them helped or harmed my studies particularly. I'm in touch with very few people from those societies now, though I did gain one of my best friends from Poohsoc. I went to a Poohsoc meeting when I was back in Cambridge for work last year. It was startlingly similar: the faces had changed but the people were much the same. I even met the person who, like me, had filled the post of Tigger; he was tall, excitable, and wore a lot of orange.

("27. There are two long-haired, tall, bearded Tiggers.")

There weren't any formal campus communities that turned into a "third place" for me - while I was involved in a bunch of clubs (student newspaper, a capella, human-powered-vehicles team, etc) and committees (curriculum revision, etc) and labs (design lab, robotics lab), they felt... like classes, in a way. What I mean by that is that I saw them as groups I'd join for a while to do do stuff with, but we could stop doing that stuff at any time.

This doesn't mean I didn't have a great time there, and learn good stuff - and I did these things with friends, and met some very good friends in these activities initially, but it does mean that when I look back at my college years I don't consider "newspaper club" or "dancing club" or "library worker" or whatever to have been a core part of my identity. I was an Olin student. I did stuff. I had classes, I had work, I had friends, I had project teams.

I'd say that the school itself, while I was there, was the closest thing I had to somewhere that felt like "home." In part this is because I had a hard time feeling "at home" where my family lives (although I love them dearly), so it was a "what's the best option for 'home' available I've got?" thing. It did take a (long and intensely schoolwork-filled) while before that happened, sometime between the end of my freshman and the middle of my sophomore year; I'm shy and I make friends slowly, and it takes months for me to know a person well enough to open up to them, so for instance while I started hanging out with my friend Mark sometime mid-freshman year (we studied in the same lounge) I wouldn't have considered him a good friend until... possibly mid-sophomore year, and while my friend Andrew and I wrote for the newspaper together from the start of freshman year, it was the end of sophomore year before we started hanging out much outside of coursework.

It helped with the transition that I had a few close friends from high school, and that we all used our high school's notesfiles (a sort of early online forum) system to keep in touch. Mm, the internet. I'm actually looking back with interest (as I write) on the transition of my social life from high school friends to college friends; by Valentines' Day my freshman year, I was still in touch enough with my high school friends to want to prank them, but I'd met enough acquaintances-on-their-way-to-becoming-friends at college to have accomplices for that prank. The prank, by the way, was tricking my high school friends into thinking I was dating, which they considered so improbable they had actually set up a betting pool for it when I was 16 or so. I spent something like 5 minutes on relationships at college, and all that time was spent (awkwardly, but what I hope was politely) turning down guys who were interested in me, so that wasn't an impactful extracurricular activity for me as it was for a number of my friends.

The summer between freshman and sophomore years, I spent... not corresponding with my college buddies, but getting in touch with my high school friends, which indicates I was still much closer to my high school than my college friends at that time. I think a lot of my college friends did the same. Sophomore year seems to be the year where you transition social groups, because you go into your second year knowing a few people you'd sorta like to hang out with more and get to know this time around, and it's not so much a "whoa, 100% new people!" scary thing.

Huh.

I, too, have no regrets about the time I spent on extracurriculuar stuff. I found out I loved teaching and that I was good at it, and sometimes I'd spend so much time teaching that my own grades suffered; worth it (though it freaked me out considerably at the time). I should have slept and eaten more, but... on the other hand, when you're 17 and your world has exploded into possibilities for the first time, it's... hard to scold or regret that you actually went and sucked the marrow out of all you could, though it is good, I think, that I'm learning a somewhat healthire and more reasonable "how to not burn out" balance these days.

I also don't regret the time I spent on (most of my) coursework. (I could have learned more, I think, without the differential equations and statistics problem sets, and the biology reading quizzes, and the product marketing and pricing simulation game, among a few other things.) We did a lot of projects in my college; most of them were okay projects, but there were a few I really, really loved (my robotics class project, for one). We did these projects in teams; most of them were okay teams, but there were a few I really, really loved (my business class team, which had probably my two best friends from college - though I didn't know they would be that at the time - on it). I take a lot of pride in getting all my projects to be good, so many times my team and I would start meetings at midnight and didn't stop hacking until morning, when we demoed our whatever-it-was with bleary but beaming eyes. (Although... sometimes our projects didn't work. But then we learned how to explain that. Our chording keyboard, wall-walker, and hard drive dissection stand out as particular examples of educational FAIL.)

So in response to your original question, Sumana - the "organized activities and groups that took up a lot of my time and provided lots of my socializing" may actually... have been class project teams, in terms of percentage of time they took up (maybe half my socializing-in-groups time). They came and went as classes came and went; I wasn't necessarily close friends with people I worked with, but we did come to know each other, at least to the "good acquaintance" level, by virtue of having spent several hours a week for 12 weeks working together. The other half was actually hanging out with friends (and sometimes doing schoolwork, so the boundaries are blurry), but outside of clubs and classes.

I think I may have been in a weird situtation, though, because there were a small enough number of people at my school (about 150 when I started, 300 when I graduated) that we could see each other operating as groups-of-friends outside of class (I had a few loose groups of folks I tended to hang out with more; I didn't really hang out with the folks who partied on the weekends, etc.) without formal boundaries of "this group is the Christian Club group, this group is the Theatre Club group" defining our social identities. It was "ah yes, so-and-so tends to hang out with X, Y, and Z," with no need for that crew to collectively join a club or a fraternity in order to label and preserve their social identity as a group.

My braindump response is now longer than your original post. :)

My first two years of college, nearly all my friends were in the Storyteller's club (we got together once a week, ate milk and cookies, and read to each other, usually but not always out of kids' books). Then one of them, Moss, wrote Bloglet and started the blogmass. He graduated when I was a sophomore, and my then-girlfriend convinced me to transfer to the Santa Fe campus (and then dumped me, but that's another story). While I was there I kept up with the ex-Storytellers via the blogmass, but I didn't make many close friends, and even though I tried to start a Santa Fe chapter of the Storytellers, it never really took off. I was in a small jazz band in Santa Fe and sometimes went to calisthenics or water polo club, but other than that I didn't participate in many extracurriculars, and I didn't have much of a social life. If it hadn't been for the blogmass, I would have been agonizingly lonely. I still think back to evenings in front of the fire, listening to stories and eating Oreos, with an aching fondness, but I'm happy to say that most of the friends I made then are still on the blogmass, and I get to keep up with their daily lives on a regular basis, which makes me very happy.

I don't regret spending a lot of my socializing time with a clique, but in a bunch of ways, CUMB was the wrong clique for me to pick. I got very emotionally invested in an organization that the administration hated and that was nearly torn apart by internal politics toward the end of my time at Columbia. I used to blame the internal politics on what the administration was doing to us, but older and wiser me thinks it was our own damn fault. I'm not in touch with any of those people anymore, except a few that were also in a much healthier organization I was in (the Rabi Scholars Program, a science club - which had its own dysfunctions, but at least there was only one complete asshole and he wasn't in a position of authority).

If I had it to do all over again I think I'd start my own club. I'd call it the Museum-Goers Club, and we'd do all of the NYC tourist things that I never actually did because I was too busy studying.

One of your can-of-wormsy questions. At Sydney my Third Place was the Dramatic Society, which provided me with friends and affairs for years after I graduated, but which was pretty royally toxic. I've stayed in touch with no one from there (one person who is still a close friend saw me in a play, but we didn't make friends until later.)

I got to do my do-over at Trinity! Who gets to do that? Lucky me. A couple of friends tangentially made through the computer groups there are still in my closest circle here in California. But I also got caught up in an off-campus theatre company and made one of the best friends of my whole life there.

My main regret about my youth is how long it took me to find the courage to call things by their true names and value them at their worth. I hung around lots of people and places I knew I should have left much earlier (church, Sydney Uni, a bunch of very destructive relationships.) I guess my judgment would never have improved if I hadn't had those very painful lessons.

I love this question. My Third Place began with GLOBE for my first year, and it was absolutely a feeling of 'coming home' - queer people besides me and my girlfriend? Awesome!

By the middle of my second year, though, that feeling of 'my people!' had transferred to my friends (all met via queer activities, save Laura the roommate), and the various ways we hung out. The parties at the cottage often functioned as a variation of a Third Place, actually, given the number of people who came as friends of friends of friends.

A core group of us who became the most central parts of my college family all started in GLOBE, though, and I think that forming our friendships as a group within a semi-structured meeting really allowed for a cohesion that I've never felt since. (A great friend who's a skilled 'convener' was part of that group, and his involvement was pivotal as well.)

That said, I led fluid (bisexual social and discussion group) until I graduated, and it was great to have that as a space to go to, that was regularly available, since (sadly) the 'but do you really exist, or are you just dallying' questions are draining and pretty constant. That group was definitely worth it, and while it stole some health and sleep away, I don't think it negatively impacted my studies all that much, as I'd have shirked just as much without it.

Looking back, I'm glad that I had my various Third Places, but I'm also glad that my college family developed alongside the campus groups we were involved with, rather than wholly within them. For one thing, it made bringing in non-queer folks easier (two of the people from college I'm closest to now are great allies, but they wouldn't have joined a group that was specifically for queer students, for example).

Thanks for making me think about this, even if it does lead to gigantic rambling comments from me!

I was a music student, which was pretty all-consuming, and I went to a small, undistinguished liberal arts college that had little else to recommend it. I still keep in touch with friends from college, but I have less and less in common with them as I pursue other interests--the people I most enjoy continued contact with are some of my math and CS professors. I love music and I'm still a performer, but I wish I hadn't been a music major; it kept me from being able to devote serious time to anything else.

I'm pretty heavily regretful about most of my college experience--I didn't fit in there, but when I voiced my doubts I was guilted into staying, and I wasn't experienced enough to know what I was looking for anyhow; if I had been more knowledgeable and confident then I would have transferred somewhere with a larger, more diverse, and more intellectually curious student body, in a city with more outside opportunities.

My third place, from about fourth grade through the first semester of my senior year of college, was backstage; if I wasn't cast in a given show, I was working tech somehow, from children's theater through high school drama club to the theater department. I've honestly never put that together before. I was involved in one show or another almost continuously for over a decade, and then I wasn't.

I have both regrets and gratitude about that. I learned a lot about self-presentation, and it did provide me a useful social context: book-centric twelve-year-old Brendan learned to talk and joke with fluid groups of humans, and when I got to college I was able to quickly make friends just by showing up to auditions. On the other hand, anything you've ever heard about incestuous drama among drama students is true, and I wonder if I'm still feeling that drag on my emotional development.