Does college make your self-esteem better or worse?

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I noticed that if I do well and make friends I start to feel better about myself. But this doesn't always happen, what if I don't make friends and do worse and end up hating myself. I hate being defined by what I make of myself.

we are all defined by what we make of ourselves, so that never changes.

so make yourself kind and generous!

Merle

Isn't it easier to socialize in college; as many people have similar interests there?

For the most part, I found it so much easier to socialize and make friends in college than in high school. I started off at a community college in the same town as my high school, ended up making friends with about twenty people with whom I graduated yet I had never seen before. It was a bit more difficult when I moved a few states away to start up my engineering degree at a university initially, however, over time I made friends fairly easily with most everyone in the department, then networked out from them.

Socialization skills don't magically materialize from high school to college.

I found it really easy to make friends. Nothing to it really. Best thing really to make it even easier is to approach people who have similar interests.
True socialisation skills don't magically appear but that isn't what should be happening. You should really just be improving and gaining new skills, not praying to god that they'll just come to you. Anyway just remember to relax a bit before the first greeting.

Making FRIENDSHIPS is hard.

You're making the assumption that those who are isolated make no attempt to reach out. What might come easily to you, does not generalise to the rest of the AS populace. In fact, if you are familiar with the AS diagnostic criteria, criterion A of the DSM-IV states: "Severe and sustained impairment in social interaction." "Remember[ing] to relax a bit" doesn't cut it.

Sure

I know that if I apply myself now, then I can work on a team of people who design machines that, bluntly put, drop bombs on people without human intervention in the near future

That might be pretty cool

I am hell-bent on my academic career and of course things going as planned makes me feel good

As a scientifically-minded introvert (though I do not have AS), my self-esteem was definitely boosted. I don't really give a s**t about the other students, but I got to meet and work with great, interesting professors who are interested in things that most people just brush off as "too complicated" or "boring."

I'm not sure if it's easier, but it was better. In college, there wasn't as much social pressure as in high school. In college, was pretty much free to socialize as I wished, even not at all. In high school, I got criticized because I didn't attend school functions(sporting events, dances, etc.), because they thought if I didn't socialize their way, I wasn't socializing enough, at all, or I was socializing wrong. When I would talk about how socializing, enjoying oneself, etc., was up to the individual, I'd get told I was crazy or I was wrong and had to do it their way. College wasn't like that, it was a free, less conformist, environment.

In the long run College has a net-positive effect on your self-esteem in the vast majority of cases. This is simply because you are much more likely to find yourself in a field you enjoy.

I agree with you there because it did do me some good, but there were problems, mainly my parents and sister. My parents decided to move to a small town after I graduated high school and thought I'd do well at the small university that was there. My sister was finishing college at the same time I was finishing high school and had been accepted to a graduate school in another state, so my parents also promised me she'd be gone once I started college and my life would be much better.

We moved and she decided to take a class that summer before going away to graduate school. She liked it so much she decided instead she'd stay there and take science classes and try to get into medical school. As a result, she lived with us and of course we still had our conflicts, mainly her trying to push me around. She even tried to put restrictions on study time saying "You can't study all the time." In addition, my parents decided since she wanted to go to medical school, I needed to be supportive of her, which meant whenever she wanted me to go somewhere with her or do something with her, I had no choice but to drop whatever I was doing and join her. If I didn't want to, they'd rant and rave about it how I because I didn't want to do what she did, I had mental problems, etc., it was totally crazy, definitely not what they promised me. She did get into medical school 2 years later and when she left, it did start to get better for me since I was free to do what I wanted, but that didn't last.

Ironically, they said I was crazy for not wanting to go out as much as she did, she was the one who was institutionalized twice because she supposedly couldn't take the stress of medical school She also came home on stress leave, which upset my parents and there was nothing but screaming, yelling, fighting, etc. in the house for months until she went back to school. And of course, I was forced to spend every minute with her, my education pretty much being on the back burner until she went back to school.

She ended up dropping out, which devastated my parents. She had also told her doctors horrible things about them, which also hurt. I felt no sympathy for them at all and felt they got what they deserved. I always knew the way they catered to her, allowed her to mistreat others, never made her deal with anything she didn't like or do what she didn't want, would blow up in their faces one day and when it finally did, I didn't care, since I had suffered in the past because of their putting her on a pedastal.

If she had been gone from the beginning like my parents promised, things might have been better in some ways, but it wasn't to be. You just have to take life as it comes.

I think starting something complex and time consuming and finishing it can only help boost your self-esteem whereas not finishing can be harmful to your self-esteem. It is a sense of accomplishment and no one can take that away from you.

School, just like life, is what you make of it. I would much rather define myself than have someone else or a bunch of people define me.

And, if you come out of college with one friend that lasts, then mission accomplished. You may have many "college friends", but once y'all graduate then you'll lose some due to people moving or getting married or whatever.

I can get a little locked into the "What if..." thinking a little too much and have to remind myself that I am worrying about something that has not manifested itself yet. Not an easy thing to do but when I do I get that same sense of accomplishment.

One major,super-duper, big, ginormous, galactic difference between socializing from High School to college is the fact that as a freshman you can get away with asking people, firstly, "What's your major?".