Maximizing Socializability

My life has become busy enough of late that I find myself now required to write about events some days past, which is something I prefer not to do. It is much more preferable for myself, and likely for the reader, if I write about events which have just transpired, so that they may be fresh and detailed. Writing on Europe became painful near the end, because so much time had passed since I had arrived back in the States that I was struggling to remember just what order things had occurred in. I believe my final account to be accurate, but I cannot be certain, and this troubles me.

I find, however, that matters of emotional abstraction are profound enough as to defy forgetfulness, and two weeks ago held enough such impact to remain, at least in its relevant details, fairly whole in my mind. The week a fortnight past was Rice’s orientation week, when all the new students come on campus to become familiarized with the details of the University, fill out a bunch of paperwork, and formalize their enrollment. However, in addition to all that, there’s a social dimension to orientation week which dominates the campus. There are all manner of meet-and-greets, barbecues, and department dinner galas to get people across campus to meet each other and their professors and staff.

I remember, now four years past, my orientation week as a freshman coming in to Rice for my undergraduate education. For the undergrads, orientation week focuses precious little on the formal aspects of University orientation, with just a tiny sliver of time each day devoted to such mundane tasks as choosing a major and making sure all the bills are paid. The majority of that week is consumed by what can best be described as a week-long semi-organized block party, engineered expressly to keep the freshman class busy every waking moment of every day of the week. One must understand as well the residential college system of Rice, which makes the dorms into much more than places to sleep, but into full-on communities with cultures, politics, rituals, and legend. We do not have the Greek organizations at Rice – the colleges more or less obviate their existence. And during orientation week, they feel much as I imagine a fraternity might – the freshmen are subjected to activities and rituals which certainly resemble hazing initiations, apart from the fact that one is, technically, anyway, not required to participate. Apart from that, there are all manner of other activities and events which seem expertly designed to make people feel awkward and get them to talk out and act out in ways they wouldn’t normally do – not in front of three hundred strangers, anyway.

I remember not especially enjoying orientation as a freshman, though I will admit to being completely unprepared for it. Psychologically, I mean. Coming to Rice initially, I had just gotten through a fairly lonely and quietly depressing summer. This was largely because I was coming to terms with the realization that the entirety of my social pyramid was getting ready to collapse – or, at any rate, getting ready to cease being relevant. I was aware already that the people which I presently counted as my best friends would soon become but footnotes in the history of me, and this was a depressing prospect that took some getting used to. It was not something that was good to think about for too long when I had nothing to do all day but sit at my computer and brood. So I admit to arriving at Rice in a somewhat dark and surly mood. It’s not that I wasn’t happy to come to Rice and start college – it was merely that I was still far too profoundly aware of the loss I would, of necessity, suffer as a result of this new stage in my life. But I had just started to come to terms with it. Though I was still, preemptively, perhaps, in mourning for my lost relationships, I remember assuring myself it was for the best and that now, finally, I could get down to the business of being an adult.

Orientation week at Rice, for the freshmen, is not the sort of event that works well with this mentality. The vestiges of a thwarted depression clashed horribly with the giddy insincerity in the cheerfulness of the upperclassmen there to greet us and steer us around campus. Nor was my resolved determination to start being an “adult” congruent with the bizarre cartoonishness of the orientation ice-breaker games, pep-rally-esque public events, and ridiculous totally-not-hazing rituals. I did not appreciate the attempt at structured happiness that was being imposed on me, and I certainly did not feel that I had the freedom I sought to console my loss. And so I did not enjoy my time at orientation week – it was all loud, bright insanity, when all I wanted was quiet, reserved dignity. It was, for the most part, more of the same quasi-social exhibitory nonsense that I had left behind at high school – except now my friends weren’t around to endure it with me. I don’t recall actually making many friends until some time after that week, when things calmed down a bit and I was able to get myself sorted out psychologically. It took more time than it should have needed to.

Two weeks ago, however, was orientation week again, but this time, of course, I came in with the graduate students. My attitude going into this new orienation was quite different than four years ago – for weeks, I’ve actually been looking forward to it. I spent much of my summer living alone and socializing sparingly, and saw the opportunity to meet new people as a means to alleviate some of the malaise. More to the point, I have once again lost a significant portion of my social network, this time to the emigration of my recently graduated friends. I saw orientation week as an opportunity to build the foundation of a new social pyramid, and make some new friends right away, hopefully outside of my own department.

Graduate orientation week, I feel, was conducted the way it should be. There were formalities to address – getting ID cards, attending information seminars, listening to terribly boring speeches by the administration, and of course, gettings our finances all in order. These, however, still consumed precious little of the week – one or two events related to these would occur on each day. Another thing I would say is that all this business was dealt with in a very, well, businesslike fashion – terse and to the point. I liked it. It was expedient, most importantly, which allowed us all more time to deal with the real issues of orientation week, that is, the socializing.

This time, even the social events were less formal than they were for undergraduate orientation. Now, the kinds of social events which occurred four years ago at undergraduate orientation looked like spontaneous frothing pots of ludicrous college cheers and people willfully humiliating themselves. They looked like parties, shindigs, and mixers. They certainly appeared to be informal in every aspect – but they were not. No, because they were still structured – these social engagements were engineered affairs, with every detail of interaction planned and prescribed ahead of time by the orientation coordinators, upperclassmen who go out of their way to make “O-week,” as it’s called, a flawlessly directed theater of artificed fun. The formality with which O-week is conducted may be seen as ironic, for the unspoken rules of engagement and the nature of the social activities planned are such as to give the impression of informality. But that’s just it – it’s engineered informality, which requires planning and rules to maintain.

This time, social engagements usually carried little more instruction than “be at X at around Y o’clock; there will be food.” And this is exactly the way it should be. These kinds of mixers are easy and truly informal, with genuine, unforced conversation. But of course, perhaps most importantly, this time I had an eager willingness to socialize, and a real desire to make friends. That week, most of my time was spent in this way, standing about among large groups of people, introducing myself countless times and doing exactly what should be done at mixers – mixing. The O-week formalism is mixed from without – the coordinators stirred us as with mighty paddles, counting their strokes to ensure an even texture. But real humans prefer to mix by diffusion, individuals traversing a random walk through the social medium. Food, coffee, beer, and music may have been added as catalysts for this process, but ultimately, we were left to our devices, and fared quite well for it. It was all very dignified.

I had some amount of apprehension before orientation, however, though of a sort unrelated to my experience at the start of undergraduate. The sources of my apprehensions were of a different sort – no longer was there a psychological disjoint. Instead, I feared that I may actually undersocialize. Coming on orientation, I became resolved to interact as much as possible with people outside of the chemical engineering department, reasoning that it would be inevitable that I would become friends with everyone there – socializing with them overmuch during orientation would have been superfluous and unnecessary. After all, there were already events planned for just after that first week that involved my department exclusively – I could meet them there. So I thought it best, strangely, to avoid excessive interaction with members of my department that I might meet others while I had the chance.

Related to that, there was some anxiety going into orientation about how many people I would actually get to meet and befriend. It was all fine and good if I got outside my department and met a bunch of people, but with how many of these people would I actually interact with afterwards, when the week was all finished and I was cloistered inside my department? I found myself considering a paradoxical situation – I felt I needed to introduce myself to the maximum number of people to spread my social network over a wide area, but I also needed to spend a long time dealing with select individuals so that I might produce a friendship there. It seemed, at times, that it would be impossible, and I fretted much in the days leading up to orientation about which tack would give me the best long-term results – focused interaction, or widespread networking.

In the end, of course, it was straight informality that won out. I recognize, in hindsight, that much of the apprehension and scheming on my part prior to orientation was little more than an internalized version of the forced interaction I was subject to during undergraduate orientation. Social engagements, it seems, are quite difficult to engineer effectively, and I’ll admit that my skills are not up to it. Orientation went well, and I met a tremendous number of people, most of which, unfortunately, I did not really “befriend” in a real social sense. They are acquaintances now, and, as I anticipated, the people I am becoming closest with are those within my department. Despite what I’ve just said, I really do think I should have made a better effort to stay clear of chemical engineers the first week – there was an engineering mixer the second day, and though the place was crawling with bioengineers and computer scientists, I ended up meeting only a couple of them – I spent almost the whole time talking to chemical engineers.

This brings me to some observations about how people interact in these kinds of situations. On that first engineering mixer, we chemical engineers essentially formed a clique almost immediately. We gathered around, and talked amongst ourselves, but this was more or less unintentional. We just started talking, and, as it was informal, felt no immediate need to break it off. It would have been unnatural – naturally, the conversations continued and transformed, and we spoke very little with anyone else. I reflected on this later – the clique was an accident, borne of little more than a common field of study. Later in the week, when I observed the formation of cliques, such as the architects at a mixer outside the graduate pub, Valhalla, I thought again that these, too, must just be accidents. And indeed, they were – breaking a clique is surprisingly easy. They do not form around and exclude others from the conversation out of exclusivity – they do not realize they are doing it. When I walked into these circles and interrupted to introduce myself to these architects, or Taiwanese students, or whoever the clique was, I was not an intruder on a closed group – I was a smiling face, and the clique was immediately broken.

As the week came to a close, I found myself with a tremendous number of new acquaintances, but with precious few people whose future friendship I could yet anticipate. There were countless interesting conversations with many different people of all sorts, but few of these bore fruit of any kind – we would politely say farewell and part ways. I don’t think that the socializing I did through that week was useless – quite the contrary, it was enjoyable and I really did get to meet a great variety of people. I went to almost every social event I could find on campus, even a few that were meant for other departments, like chemistry and physics. But I think what I really learned was that even this kind of informal general socializing isn’t really the way to meet people, and really meet them. When I walked up to any random group of people at a mixer and introduced myself, I had, of course, no idea who I was beginning to talk to. I had no idea if I had anything in common with these people, and frequently, it would turn out that I didn’t really.

I know I’m framing this all in the social engineering set again, but to really maximize socializability, there needs to be some degree of foreknowledge. Why do the cliques form? Because everyone in the clique has something in common. They are not intentionally forming that way, no, but that’s what naturally happens. I thought it would be inevitable that I would be friends with the people in my department – I think that’s true. We all have so much in common. So to make friends, and not just acquaintances, I need this knowledge. I need to find people with whome I really have something in common beyond being a new graduate student, and having a desire to talk to people.

The mixers and events were great, and probably necessary. However, that isn’t the way. I’m still working on how to maximize my socializability. I might find it in clubs or organizations, or I might find it by just working on those acquaintances long enough. I don’t know yet, but I’m fairly confident. And I’m confident that this year’s orientation did what it needed to do. It was a good week, and it’ll be a good year.

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