Advices

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Making Friends After Leaving Home

Bywenzele

Moving away from home to go to a new school and town is a very exciting chapter in young adults lives, but it can also be very intimidating and overwhelming. After the chaotic journey of arriving, moving in, and trying to get settled in an unfamiliar place, some find they start to feel lonely.

Getting out of your comfort zone in a foreign place can be frightening, and making friends with strangers even more so.

Positive human connection is essential in feeling comfortable and safe in a strange place, but it can be difficult to figure out what to say and who to talk to when trying to form these connections.

Kamloops City View at Sunset, September 2025, Emersyn Wenzel

I spoke with Kendra Leslie, a TRU Psych student from Grand Forks, who came to Kamloops to experience new people and a much bigger city than what she is used to. During our discussion, she shared her thoughts about how her own connections made her feel more at home in a town so far from her own.

Through this conversation with Kendra, she gives thoughtful advice about how to make friends as well as how important it is to create relationships with others in order to feel at home.

What Kendra humbly explains gives insight into the lives of average TRU students trying to feel at-home in the place so many of us already call our own.

If you would like to hear these thoughts through Kendra’s own words, click the audio below:

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Moving to TRU as a new beginning

Bymarceletm

Many people think that studying abroad is just a wonderful adventure. They think it’s about relocating to another country, soaking up different cultures, and getting ways to open up new doors. Actually, there is a flip side to it. When you change your country of residence, you also have to adapt to a new lifestyle which might require efforts. You can even get isolated and not sure what your next steps are.

New country, new language, new styles, It is quite a change engaging every sense and it could be overwhelming at first. What the nature of the challenges you face really depends on how correlated your culture is to the one you’re moving to.

Another thing is that the time spent by oneself allows people to develop self-confidence, come up with new ideas and do many other things that they are otherwise deprived of when socializing. Whenever the students from the same country come together, they talk most of the time in their language and do things that remind them of home. The students who have developed friends from the new country usually are the ones who have to deal the least with homesickness.

Later on, after settling down and getting used to it, there is a good chance that you will make friends that will last a long time. You will be able to connect with people from other cultures and quite possibly make some friends for life at TRU.

TRU campus view, october 2025, Manon Marcelet

I spoke with Shashank, an Indian student who came to Kamloops for his studies at Thompson Rivers University. In our discussion, he shared his feelings about leaving his family and his home country, the few difficulties he experienced upon arriving in Canada and, lastly, he described how his stay here affected him in a positive way.

Through a conversation with Shashank we understand better the experience of studying abroad. We get to see through the lens of someone who not only moved, but also integrated into a foreign country and students of other countries. In the end it was a very rewarding journey as Shashank told us.

What Shashank explains about what it means to study is undoubtedly valuable for every aspect of life. Start here if you want to get a real understanding of what it means to move and start anew in a foreign country Canada in this case.