Reply to Son (20) can fit in at large state school. Advice?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]He needs to find a community.

He should join 2 clubs this semester.  Maybe professional fraternities.

He should prioritize taking smaller classes and see if he can invite any classmates for study sessions or coffee.

Another possibility is to do some volunteering that's socially beneficial.

Is there any musical ensemble he could join?

Maybe online dating?

Consider talking to an RA or the mental health services center to get locally relevant ideas.

It's never too late to take a gap year or transfer.  But one needs to make sure the issues were really place-linked.

Coming home might not be a bad idea.  I switched from one big state school to another after freshman year.  Rural to urban, shared room to single, didn't find friends to easy to find friends. And I could go home on weekends much easier. It all turned around in one year.[/quote]

Yes thank you for the response. A couple things ( and this is also to everyone’s responses). 
1. He is already decently close to home: like an hour and 20 away. He’s coming home for this weekend.
2. He really hit a social gridlock this semester after he started rushing for frats. With all except one, he got the vibe that frats drink too much and aren’t academic. 
3. He did some extra curricular’s freshman year, but some of the wrong ones for him. A big mistake was doing debate, because the team ended up being toxic to him spring semester.
4. While he spends a lot of time in his room, it’s not like he has no friends. He has a nice group of sophomores who also live in the dorm which he hangs out with every other day. But, everyone lives in singles so they are all introverted. His closest friends are still from high school.

So my resolution, as a parent, is to say that. 
A.) Frats might not be for you and that’s ok 
B.) He needs to do extracurriculars he likes, not ones that he thinks would look good on a resume ( what he was doing last year). He was a four year varsity track/cc athlete in high school, and for the first time he’s trying running club this semester ( but we’re only four days in so I don’t know how’s it going yet).
C.) If he does want to transfer, I think a small Catholic college like holy cross would be best. BUT, I’m not sure if he has the grades for it. He did well in high school (4.00 uw/ 5APs/1350 sat) and pretty well first semester of college (3.67 gpa). He was doing well at the start of spring semester, but tanked in his final exams after the loneliness finally caught up with him. So he has a 3.5 now.

The one upshot is that his best class second semester, a history class, really upgraded his writing skills. He loved the class and befriended the professor, and one big regret about transferring would be leaving the opportunity to do a senior thesis with him. He’s a history major ( and I got a PhD in history), so he was already very gifted in writing, but this summer I read some of his essays and they were just phenomenal. BUT, I’m hoping that him doing well this semester plus his essay writing might get him into  holy cross as a junior?[/quote]

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