I was involved with the queer alumni group at my college for five years between 2014 and 2020, and on the group's advisory board for 3 of those years. So I was consistently on campus taking part in board activities (including meeting with students) once or twice a year, and I also usually had one or two other opportunities to come back to campus each year as I was frequently in the general area for work-related reasons. So I decided I would make a concerted effort to cultivate friendships with basically any queer students who were open to the possibility.
I guess I reached out regularly to about 8 students, saw 2 of those intermittently and 4 regularly when I was in town, did "supportive adult figure" activities like sending beginning- and end-of-term cards consistently for those 4, made an effort to keep in contact with all of them after graduation, and after 7 years of working at it I've ended up with 2 friends. Plus one more person who was peripherally in their friend group that has some friend potential, but we'll see.
There were some weird aspects to this project.
The biggest of those was that I was twice the age of most of the students in 2015, and there aren't a lot of cultural templates for cross-generational friendships. When talking with the students about what kind of possibilities they were looking for in friendships with older queer alumni, one of them said that they couldn't even imagine what that could look like. I responded that I didn't know either but I figured it would be something we created together as time went on. That person and their partner ended up being the 2 friends that have lasted so far.
The second was that I unilaterally decided that as long as a student kept showing interest, I would keep putting substantial effort in until they graduated. My thought was that queer students and especially queer students of colour face an uphill struggle, and it might make a difference for them to know simply that there was some other adult out in the world who cared about them and wanted them to succeed. And: students in general are busy, they have a lot on their mind, navigating school is stressful, and I figured that it would be on me to keep the relationship up because I was a random factor that it would be easy to lose track of. It was not so much I have decided that we're going to be friends as I have decided that I am going to be conspicuously available and interested. But it did mean that I was committing to putting energy into relationships that had a high probability of not working out, which took self-confidence and a determination to work through my own substantial rejection sensitivity. And a lot of them didn't work out, and you know what? that turned out to be perfectly okay in the end.
My takeaway here was that under some circumstances "making friends" is a process that can take a long time, requires a combination of diligence and flexibility, and has unpredictable outcomes, but it's not hopeless.
