Small talk with people outside the department

[comp12]

Yeah yeah, people dislike grad social mixers (or maybe social mixers in general) but wait, this is slightly different.

Have anybody realized themselves having this issue? Sure, we make friends and can have deep meaningful conversations on every topic under the sun (OK fine, on topics related to our field) with people in our own department and its allied disciplines. Some of us are also very social and have great "real-life" or "regular people" friends from outside academia.

BUT...

When you suddenly meet lots of people whom you share the awesome bond of being graduate student weirdos, but are from unrelated fields, you go amiss. You have some ostensibly strong common grounds, but it ends up just not working out that way. You have obvious superficial every-day graduate life topics to make small talk with, but you miss the jargon and the field-specific cultural and academic reference points to elevate your friendship into something more meaningful. You end up being frustrated by not being able to discus work that is obviously important to your lives beyond a mundane level, and your friendship doesn't develop, because you can't shake off your abilities to discuss academia even though you both are getting the same degrees and the same institution.

Is it just me? I make friends within the department easily, and have an easy time talking to "real" people at pubs/public places/community venues, etc. But graduate mixers at school are nightmares, and I also TA in an interdisciplinary undergrad program, where I just don't connect well with colleague TAs who are from other home departments. I guess it comes from a subconscious desire to group these people with "school friends" instead of outside friends, but a mental block disallows you to separate them from school, which proceeds to frustrate you when you can't connect on the same academic level.

[ktel]

I don't have that problem at all, but I don't base any of my friendships (school or external) on the requirement that they have to be able to talk to me about my work in depth. In fact I actually would like to avoid talking about my research outside of school. Some separation is always nice. I also don't have any close friends in my department, all are from elsewhere.

But I totally get what you mean about being graduate students yet not being able to talk about anything in common. I am in engineering, and my boyfriend's father's wife is getting her PhD in a humanities field. She keeps trying to relate to me about the thesis writing process, but the fact is our work could not be any more different. I just smile and nod.

[Guest Gnome Chomsky]

Yeah, I'm from Brooklyn. We don't use jargon in our small talk.

[R Deckard]

I don't have that problem at all, but I don't base any of my friendships (school or external) on the requirement that they have to be able to talk to me about my work in depth. In fact I actually would like to avoid talking about my research outside of school. Some separation is always nice. I also don't have any close friends in my department, all are from elsewhere.

But I totally get what you mean about being graduate students yet not being able to talk about anything in common. I am in engineering, and my boyfriend's father's wife is getting her PhD in a humanities field. She keeps trying to relate to me about the thesis writing process, but the fact is our work could not be any more different. I just smile and nod.

I agree -- keeping some separation between school and social life is a good idea. It's important to do things that make you an interesting person besides studying something cool (to me at least). Then it's much easier to socialize, as well.

Yeah, I'm from Brooklyn. We don't use jargon in our small talk.

This cracked me up.

[Eigen]

My usual crew to hang out with includes mostly grad students, but from 5 or 6 different departments.

I have yet to experience difficulty finding something to talk about- it goes from problems with advisors, courses we're teaching, research stress and writing to cooking, current events, art, music, food, relationships, pets, etc.

It does take a little work to make such friendships, but I find it really enjoyable to hang out with a range of grad students- a lot in common, but more removed from my immediate issues than the people in my program. Also makes it easy to get feedback on things I'm working on outside my immediate area of study!