How to make grad friends outside the department?

[Toria Herd]

I feel like it would be beneficial to have a support system outside my cohort/department. Most of the people I've met so far though seem to have only made friends within the department. What do you think? Is it beneficial? How do I go about this?

[Neist]

You might check to see if there's university-wide graduate student events. I know we have some here. However, I'm in the same boat. Our cohort is only five people (which is actually somewhat large for the program), and I'm slightly concerned that I'm not going to get along very well with all of them; I'm a pretty odd person, and I'm somewhat creepily optimistic, so I sometimes I get the impression that I weird people out.  

Personally, I think it's going to be healthy and preferable to have friends on both sides, within and outside of the department, if for no other reason because I have to imagine that departmental drama is inevitable, and I'd rather not be completely immersed in it.

[Visualizer]

Most schools do have graduate-school-wide events. The ones I've gone to at my current school, however, have consisted mostly of people in each department sticking together, and maybe occasionally a group of people from one program would say a few words of people from another program. Also, although people in different science programs, particularly within a broader "umbrella" like biology-related sciences (e.g. biophysics vs. genetics vs. cancer biology) would socialize together every so often, it seemed that the science and humanities graduate students acted as though they were allergic to each other.

It probably didn't help that these events were during orientation week, though. I'd hope that after people already know everyone in their own programs, they are more motivated to branch out and talk to people from completely different programs.