Welcome class of 2022, I hope you’ve settled into Paly life and are ready to experience the next four years of your adolescence. Now that you’ve breezed through freshman orientation, learned to navigate our grand campus and gotten to know all of your teachers, only one thing is missing from your freshman initiation process: learning how to successfully become and remain friends with your fellow classmates.

Now, most of you are probably thinking, “What makes the author so qualified to recommend friending techniques? He probably has no friends.” This is a fair point; however, just like famous athletes who think that their athletic prowess translates to them being good actors, my inexperience in making friends may just be the best advice to take for someone looking to meet new people.

The Charles Method

This method requires an immense amount of patience and stealth, but the reward is a friendship that will last until graduation. To begin this process, you will have to actually take the whole first-day-of-school icebreaker routine seriously, as this can help determine a friend candidate to pursue for the next year or two. Yes, you heard that right, a year or two. It is necessary be thorough when making friends.

The next step after finding someone with the same interests as you is to then follow them at school from a safe distance. I recommend 25-35 feet to remain unnoticed. Once you’ve figured out their schedule and what their favorite brand of floss is, you can make your move.

Now that you know them better than they know themselves, you can insert yourself into their next conversation with ease, and they will be eternally grateful that a new friend has magically appeared to continue with them through high school

The “No please, after you” Method  

Politeness is the name of the game with this method. It starts with finding a person worthy of your chivalry. Once you have found the only person more willing than you to thank a teacher for giving you a bad grade, you can proceed to befriend them.

This next step is key, and it requires the utmost precision. It entails you saying “hello,” “good morning,” “thank you,” “gracious to have seen you today” and “I hope you are having a satisfactory day” at least three or four times every time you see that fellow master of civility. At first, they will have to be polite back to you, but you can eventually bait them into becoming your friend out of sheer courtesy. Before you can even say “may I,” you have a new friend.

The Omelette Method

This method once again requires a lot of time and commitment to your craft, as it requires around 20-25 years of your life. However, as the old adage goes: “to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs.” Thus begins the breaking of the first egg.

Egg #1: To begin this long and arduous journey to friendship you must first graduate high school. This means earning grades and scores high enough to get you into a college that is both well-fitting and academically high-achieving. Once you have applied and are generously admitted to one of your top-choice schools, it is time to work towards your bachelor’s degree in education. This is imperative as you to make sure you can attain a position of power later on in your career. Once you have completed your education in educating, it is time to find a teaching position.

Egg #2: Once you have found a job as a teacher, it is time to start working towards that opportunity to move up in the administrative hierarchy and end up in an administrative position in California (to give you the experience necessary to work your way up to PAUSD). Now, once you have a boastful resume, make sure you’re equipped to prove to the Board of Education that you’re ready and capable to take the job as principal of Paly. At this point, you are entitled to a short round of applause for your hard work and making it this far.

Egg #3:  This is it, the final step, but still the trickiest part of the whole operation. Now that you’re the Paly principal, you can finally enact the “pal” portion of the word. You survey the campus for students worthy of playing a mid-day game of checkers with you.

Once the right students catch your eye, you can use the unheralded power of call-slips to your advantage. While some have speculated that using your administrative power to make friends is unethical, your 20 plus years of working towards this moment, however, proves those doubters wrong because you just earned yourself a