In defense of icebreakers

I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve come to appreciate icebreakers.

Back as a first-year student, I dragged my feet doing icebreakers with my RA in the lounge. Starting with orientation and continuing through the first few weeks of school, icebreakers dampened my enthusiasm for meeting new people until I felt like a No. 2 pencil without its eraser. I dreaded making a fool out of myself doing “signature dances” in front of people with whom I’d most likely come to realize I had nothing in common with.

As it turns out, icebreakers are not just about pretending to flap your arms like a chicken for a room of strangers. Their primary function is to build community oftentimes in classroom settings. Icebreakers serve as means of team-building and community-making and are especially useful at a place as large and overwhelming as UCLA, where students can get lost in the fray of classes, exams, schoolwork and other commitments. Although they are somewhat tiring in rapid succession, such as in the first few weeks of college, they do serve their purpose – getting baseline introductions and encouraging social interaction among near-strangers or acquaintances.

From the vantage point of being two-thirds of the way through my third year, icebreakers represent all the unbridled potential, socially and otherwise, that we gradually lose as we move through UCLA. I don’t often make introductions now, and I anticipate I won’t be doing that much from this point onwards. As it is for many upperclassmen, the enthusiasm most first-year students have for varied socializing has been sapped from my soul.

Icebreakers may be contrived in some regards, but nevertheless, I find that the goofiness often gives rise to a sense of community, however temporary, and orients me toward living in the social moment and away from the stresses that are running through my head. With burdens of graduate school, internship and job applications looming, it’s easy for upperclassmen to lose sight of the value of meeting new people, a fact that is not lost for most underclassmen who are still actively trying to find their social and extracurricular niche.

Icebreakers are one of the last vestiges of a more whimsical childhood that we’ve put behind us as the real world and adulthood loom large. Icebreakers, as we know them, play into the culture of emerging adulthood – the concept of an adolescence prolonged through around age 25.

For young adults in 2016, it’s part of our culture to keep one foot in childhood and the other in adulthood. As beneficiaries of this delayed cultural trend of handing down responsibilities to the young, for as long as possible, we should revel in the summer camp-like nature of the icebreaker, and the social freedoms it provides. After all, in the real world, introductions will not be quite as forgiving.