Undergrad was a big campus and friends came free with the timetable. Now it is a small department where everyone is thirty plus, married or gone by five, and the two bars near campus are wall to wall undergrads. I am nine weeks in and I do not want to spend two years like this. What actually worked that is not just join a club?
Year one of a taught masters is the worst it gets, partly because everyone is still working out whether they will still be here next year. Things changed for me when I started teaching, because the other teaching assistants are a natural cross departmental group who all have the same complaints at the same time. If your programme has any teaching, demonstrating or lab support going, take it for the social reasons even if the money is bad.
Look outside the university entirely, because the department is a workplace and you are trying to make it be a community as well, which is a lot to ask of eleven people. My best two friendships from that period came from a weeknight football team and from volunteering at a repair cafe, neither of which contained a single academic. It also meant that when the department got politically unpleasant in my second year, which it will, I had somewhere to go that was not full of the same argument.
The having somewhere the department does not reach point is underrated. When your work life and social life are the same eleven people, a bad meeting ruins everything.
Disagreeing slightly with everyone telling you to work on the cohort. Four people is not a bad number, it is a small number, and two years is short. I would put the effort into one non university thing and one existing friendship maintained properly at distance, rather than trying to reconstruct an undergraduate social life that was an artefact of being eighteen in a building with two thousand other eighteen year olds.
Host something small and repeated yourself. A monthly dinner where everyone brings one dish gets you a group faster than joining anything, because you control the frequency.
@first_repo_finn · 4w ago · 3 replies
The structural difference is that undergrad gave you forced repeated contact with the same people and grad school does not. You had halls, a timetable, and three years of the same faces whether you liked it or not, and friendship is mostly repetition plus proximity. So the fix is not events, it is recurring fixed time commitments with the same humans: a weekly climbing session, a choir, a five a side team, a language class, a pub quiz team. One thing that happens every Tuesday at seven will do more than ten one off socials, because the second time you see someone you can pick up where you left off.
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@crimp_not_solder · 4w ago
Also give it three months before judging any of them. The first two sessions of anything are always awkward and that is not information.
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@layoverlurker · 4w ago
Recurring rather than events is a genuinely different way to think about it. Everything I tried was one off.
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