As a 1L, you quickly learn that community is central to thriving and you often do not realize it until you find yourself in new surroundings. Community gives you people who care about you, check in with you, support and encourage you, hold you accountable, push you to grow and bring joy into your life. When these things are part of your everyday routine, you rarely stop to consider how much the people around you shape your life. You simply live. When those people are suddenly absent, you discover that you need more than you ever realized. You begin to see how they contribute to your joy, to your ability to excel, and to your capacity to be creative and grow. In essence, they are core to your thriving.
Merriam-Webster defines “community” in several ways but two definitions stand out here: “a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society” and “a state or feeling of caring about and wanting to interact with others in a group.” The first describes who your community is and the second describes what it feels like. Both matter and in a new environment you often have to rebuild both from scratch.
ASP and Bar Exam professionals who move to a new city or join a new organization go through a similar experience. They too realize how central their community is to their thriving. Back home, work friends are the people you sit with to talk through decisions, difficult conversations, and workplace challenges. Personal friends help with childcare, serve as emergency contacts, join you for all kinds of activities, and listen when you need to think something through out loud. If you have lived somewhere for a long time, these people are woven so deeply into your daily life that it is hard to imagine it without them.
Then you move and that network does not move with you. The phone calls and video chats help but they cannot replace someone who can meet you for coffee after a hard week or pick up your child when you are stuck at the office. Building a new community takes time because the foundation of any relationship is trust and mutual commitment. Getting to know people takes time. Finding people you connect with takes time. Nurturing those connections into something lasting takes even more. We cannot expect everything to happen immediately.
Think back to the relationships you built in a previous chapter of your life. They took time to develop and many of them probably did not start effortlessly. We tend to remember the relationships themselves not the gradual process that got us there: the awkward first conversations, the invitations that went unanswered, the slow build from acquaintance to friend.
Building community requires you to show up in new places and engage with the people you meet there. For a 1L that might mean joining a study group, attending a student organization meeting, visiting a professor during office hours, or asking a 2L or 3L to grab lunch. For an ASP and Bar professional, it might mean saying yes to the team happy hour, getting involved with a local bar association, volunteering, or joining a faith community, a running club, or a neighborhood group.
Not every connection will become a lasting friendship, and that is okay. Each time you show up, you plant a seed. Some will grow slowly, some quickly, and some not at all. But over time, the people who will check in on you, celebrate with you, and push you forward will begin to emerge. Be patient with yourself and with others. Be intentional about reaching out. And be willing to be the person who extends the first invitation because someone else in the room is likely hoping for the same thing.
All the best as you grow your support group, your professional network, and your circle of friends: your community.
(Goldie Pritchard)
