Leah Kiros, The Bowdoin Orient

From orientation trip origin stories to intergenerational friendships, students at Bowdoin form friendships in unique ways.

An integral part of the Bowdoin first-year experience are orientation trips (o-trips). Whether students go on a trip with the Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC) or the McKeen Center for the Common Good, o-trips are one of the first opportunities for new students to connect with each other. For some, the connections span throughout their time at Bowdoin.

Bella Piekarski ’28 and Saoirse Burlingame ’28 were two strangers before being paired up for their o-trip to Aziscohos Valley. During the pre-trip bonding in Watson Arena, the two connected over their shared song of the summer by Gracie Abrams. From that moment on, they spent most of their time during orientation together.

“The nature of orientation trips is [that] you get pretty comfortable with the people that you’re with, and [Burlingame] was just someone I found myself being really comfortable around because we had so much in common and so much to talk about,” Piekarski said.

After the trip, they found out they lived in the same first-year brick, Moore Hall. From then on, they became best friends, even traveling together to Burlingame’s home in London over spring break.

“It was super fun to bring our friendship out of the context of Bowdoin,” Piekarski said.

Most people at Bowdoin don’t end up going to college with their hometown friends, but Ella Perry ’26 and Delia Heyman ’26 ended up doing so. The duo have been friends since seventh grade after playing soccer together and are now both involved with the women’s club soccer team at Bowdoin. But, they didn’t plan to come to college together and even accidentally visited on the same day during their senior year of high school.

Keeping a balance between maintaining old friendships and creating new ones can be difficult in college, but even trickier at a small school.

“At first I was really worried about it, but [Perry] always says this thing where she’s just like, ‘We will always be friends, yeah?’” Heyman said. “She says that about our other home friends too. We’ve been friends for ten years at this point, so I think that provided some comfort that we didn’t have to be in the same circle, and it worked out that we were.”

Once at Bowdoin, their two worlds have blended together through shared friendships.

“It’s been fun having a lot of the same friends at Bowdoin and from home,” Perry said. “I feel like a lot of our friends from college and home get along really well when they hang out. And it’s a really fun vibe to have seen the overlap in who we hang out with.”

Friendships have also blossomed through unexpected circumstances. For Olivia Ho ’28, Shawn Lasut ’28 and Basant Kaur ’28, that experience included a delayed Amtrak train over last year’s fall break. Beginning the journey as acquaintances, the three bonded over the chaotic experience.

During fall break, Kaur was traveling back to her hometown of New York City, while Ho was visiting her sister in the same city. The two of them, who ended up on the same Amtrak to New York, were delayed in Providence, R.I. for around three hours due to a pedestrian accident with the train.

“Basically, we just trauma bonded, because it was stressful,” Ho said.

And though Lasut had gotten off the train before the delay in his home state of New Hampshire, he still bonded with the other two during the experience from afar.

“Then while all of this is happening, we’re like, texting [Lasut] … [like] ‘What do we do?’” Ho recounted.

Another pair of Bowdoin students who had an unusual path to friendship are Tolly Kaiser ’28 and Misha Alibhai ’28. On the day they met, Kaiser and Alibhai attended curling practice together, though they truly bonded when Alibhai fell and was injured at that very practice.

“I was the one that decided to go with her to the hospital. So I rode in the ambulance with her, and then went to the hospital with her. And was there with her while she was getting checked out,” Kaiser said.

This experience has since led them to be close friends.

“Ever since then, I’ve just known that [Kaiser] is going to be one of my lifelong friends because I can’t think of another person who would have done that on the first day of meeting me,” Alibhai said.

Kaiser shared how their friendship was forged even through a stressful situation.

“We met each other … through a circumstance that was not the most conducive to friendship-making, but now we’re great friends,” Kaiser said.

Other friendships on campus go back generations. Anabel Schiller ’28 and Julia Costle ’28 both have family members who went to Bowdoin. Schiller’s parents and Costle’s mom were in the same fraternity, Theta Delta Chi, which is now MacMillan House.

“Bowdoin was always something that I knew I wanted to be a part of,” Schiller said. “Just the connections that [my parents] made with the people here, they talk about their friends and their fraternity a lot, especially more in recent years, and it’s something that means a lot to them. And so when I applied, I was really focused on the friendships that I would make here.”

Courtesy of Anabel Schiller '28

When Costle got into Bowdoin, she heard from her mom about her college friends’ daughter who had also been admitted. Schiller and Costle met up at Bowdoin Bearings and immediately clicked.

“I think a big part of that was that our parents knew each other, so it was that built-in comfortability with each other,” Costle said. “Then we talked throughout the summer, and when we came to Bowdoin, us and other kids of alumni families met up and started our whole friend group. And it’s really just grown from there.”

Having a family connection led to friendship that helped the two assimilate to Bowdoin. Now, they are making an effort to do the same for the next class.

“We’ve been getting dinner with the [first years] of other alumni families that we know, just to make them feel comfortable and have somebody older looking out for them on campus,” Costle said. “Now it’s just really fun, because when our parents come to visit [us at] school, we can all hang out, and they can tell their stories from college, and [we] can tell ours. It’s just like this big Bowdoin family.”

Alibhai and Kaiser reflected on how the Bowdoin experience fosters these connections, especially between very different people.

“I think you should never put it past whoever it is, be it God or destiny or whatever, that decides how people come together, and that there’s always strange ways that fate works too,” Kaiser said.

Alibhai expressed a similar sentiment.

“It just shows that, if you want to, you can connect with truly anyone,” Alibhai said. “Especially on this campus.”

Misha Alibhai ’28 is a member of the Bowdoin Orient.