Introduction:

As a graduate student who was the first cohort in a new department and had moved into town not knowing anyone, I naturally wanted to make new friends. However, what I have come to realize is that a lot of the people in science are rather… introverted and awkward (myself included). This made making friends a lot tougher since a lot of people would rather keep to themselves instead of spending time with ‘strangers’; they are also slower to warm up to new people. Although it is healthy to make friends outside of your workplace, having rapport and a social circle among your colleagues are just as important as you will be working alongside them for years. On my journey to make new friends, I have organized social, sporting and cooking events to try to bring people together, usually within and around the lab. Granted, it takes a significant amount of time and energy to organize events as well as finding a supportive group of friends, but the reward is well worth the effort.

What I have come to realize is that, not only is making friends among your fellow graduate students important for socializing and having a support structure; it comes with an unintended benefit of building your professional network. I have been introduced and have introduced people with others in professional settings because they were friends that I have made elsewhere. There are countless times where my friends from other labs have offered advice and shared experiences that have helped me both professionally and personally. All in all, I believe that there are a lot of benefits to making a group of supportive friends and, dare I say, community, within your department and student body that are mutually beneficial to everyone involved. 

Tangible Tips:

I cannot say that I have (remotely) succeeded in creating a cohesive community within the department, but from my own failed experience and observing other people’s efforts, I have learned certain lessons that I hope can help guide other people in their journeys. Below I will highlight some of the tips on how to build a social circle, support structure and a community among graduate students.

• Build an inviting atmosphere, build momentum: When I was part of the student association, we hosted a welcoming barbeque where new students could socialize with other cohorts of students. Although we did not get to host any more events soon after due to the pandemic, a lot of students had the impression that the department hosts a lot of social events. Building the first impression of the culture/social environment to new comers is crucial as it would build momentum that can become self-sustaining in the long run. People are more prone to organizing events on their own if they are given the impression that the department is a sociable environment. Even if it is not originally, this is similar to a “fake it until you make it” situation.

• Persistence and consistency are the key: A lot of events are only one-off events or held irregularly or rarely. Events such as industry night, pub night, and networking events are special occasions where people come with specific purposes. It is hard for people to build connections and networks when attendance is not consistent. People typically have busy schedules and often cannot make it to these one-off events. Having smaller, more consistent events (for example, a coffee hour at a set time and day every week) would help foster and bolster connections between people who consistently show up. By creating a consistent platform on which people can potentially connect, you are maximizing the chances different people can socialize, even if they cannot make it to one or two of the otherwise “one-off” events. Hosting an event once is easy, but the harder thing to do is to host a second time, third time... etc. It is often discouraging to the organizer to have few, or even no one, show up at your event the first few times. I have attended and organized a few of these “one-off” coffee times where only a handful of people would show up. But with persistence and consistency, over time people will show up, and if they are having a good time, they will bring their friends/lab mates. Then voila! You have yourself a self-sustaining event where people (and hopefully yourself) can make new friends.

• Start small, don’t be too ambitious from the start: To expand on my previous point, it takes a lot of effort to organize events. And more often than not, a lot of event planning falls through since we are ambitious and wanted to make an event as grand and as awesome as possible. In the end, most of these events would end up not happening at all because of the complicated logistics needed to make it happen. Having been there, my tip would be to not plan grand and complicated events at all if you can avoid it (at least from the get-go). Make it as simple as possible. A small and better thought-out event is better than no event. The point is to provide a platform where people can socialize, what people do during this time is a secondary priority. Another experience I have had is that organizing events across buildings and campuses is extremely difficult. Even with only a few minute walk people are much less likely to show up. As soon as it takes place outside of your building, they are probably not coming. I have yet to figured out how to encourage people from other buildings/locations to attend events; I would love to share again once I have crossed this bridge.

• Get out of your comfort zone, go beyond the clique: Okay, so you have gotten your coffee time going, now what? What you might end up seeing most of the time is that lab mates end up socializing among each other at a table in the corner. Tables of people from the same lab, talking only to each other; effectively segregating yourself from others and honestly, defeating the entire purpose of the event. I am guilty of this myself. At a lot of social events, as much as I came with the intention of making new friends, I often find myself socializing mainly with people from within the lab. This makes sense because we work with these people the most and spend the most (office) time with them. They are your comfort zone. I also understand it is scary to break into a clique as much as breaking out of your own clique. It can be very intimidating, uncomfortable and anxious to pull up a chair and start chatting at a group of have already having a good time. Unfortunately, socializing is not something one can force others to do and it is a struggle for most people (again, myself included). On the other hand, and I’d like to stress this point, what we can do is to provide a relaxed and sociable environment where people can feel less anxious about mixing and breaking their cliques.

• Try not to make it about work (even if it might be): Being in graduate school, there are a lot of departmental events/seminars that are work-oriented. We are all familiar with the bombardment of emails about seminars and networking events across multiple department email lists that we have signed up for. Moreover, with the advent of the pandemic sparking discussion on graduate mental health, inclusion, and diversity within the graduate community (which I wholeheartedly agree are things that we should advocate for and discuss about), a lot of mental health and wellbeing focused events are also organized and advertised. While these events do serve their intended purpose of learning new things as well as talking about uncomfortable but important topics such as mental wellbeing, people often feel intimidated or even exhausted into talking or listening to them. The effect is that they do not feel comfortable attending the event at all because they feel obligated to talk about their own research/work or mental wellbeing because the event is advertised as such. What I experienced is that when people come out to an event, such as coffee time or just a few graduate students sipping on a glass of wine on a weekday night, people can and do steer the conversation to these kinds of topics regardless since we are often passionate (or dispassionate) about science and life. When people feel comfortable with the group they are socializing with (see my earlier point of building a strong supportive group), they tend to open up about their personal experience and struggles. However, if rapport is not built or if students feel compelled/obligated to talk about these to strangers, this is much less likely to happen. Thus, it is crucial to host “lower stakes” events where people can build such support structures, even if the real aims are to improve student social and mental wellbeing, making professional connections and networks without being advertised as such from the get-go.

• Getting funding and cutting through red-tape: Finally, this is something that I find to be the bottleneck to establishing a good social structure in a department is the bureaucracy. Understandably, publicly funded universities have a responsibility to spend their money on research-related items and as such, have policies and structures to ensure funding is spent responsibly on research-related initiatives. However, as a byproduct of these structures and goals, event funding requests and applications are extremely difficult to be approved. In my experience, applying for funding for specific one-off events is relatively easy since they often have specific purposes. However, funding recurring events that help to build a community within the department is much more difficult to justify as they are less directly related to research output (even if the end result might increase research collaboration and output). Even if funding is approved, depending on the institution and department, there might be limitations or strings attached to the funding itself, which can make logistics more difficult than originally thought. Outside of the department, there are a lot of outside opportunities where funding can be found. I have been a part of a student association where funding is raised externally through sponsors and industry partners, where they can sponsor a spot at an event (e.g. a product show where they can advertise their products). The result was that they have enough funding to host events that are not restricted by the department since the money does not originate from them. 

To summarize, to make new friends, build a network and organize events takes a lot of effort and energy. I have outlined various tips based on the experience I have gone through personally or vicariously through others in hopes of increasing your chances of making these events a reality. The goal of organizing these events and the bottom line is: you cannot force people to talk to other colleagues or people they work with, however you can maximize the chances of putting people in the same room and connecting with each other.

References:

Below I have listed two resources where I find to help reinforce my points and to further explore other people’s efforts:

The Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan has page outlining briefly what their various departments have done to bring together their communities. This is a good place to take some inspiration.

Another publication by Beauchamp et al. have highlighted some of the important points of building a student community. Although this particular publication focuses on building a virtual community during the COVID pandemic, a lot of the point still stands. Specifically, they have brought up various approaches to enhance the students’ sense of belonging to the community, though these are rather catered to departmental policies and initiatives.

Beauchamp, J., Schwartz, E., & Pisacreta, E. D. (2020). Seven practices for building community and student belonging virtually. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.313740

Facilitating academic success. Rackham Graduate School: University of Michigan. (2021, June 23). Retrieved May 8, 2022, from https://rackham.umich.edu/faculty-and-staff/facilitating-academic-success/

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to The (Un)Scientific Method podcast and SciCATS for hosting this workshop series, with funding from NSERC Science Communications Skills Grant.