Stop networking and start making friends
There is a huge emphasis on socializing in business school. But as you pack your schedule with happy hours, karaoke nights and student club activities, it’s easy to network yourself into exhaustion without feeling like you’ve made any true friends. The social pressure to meet and befriend as many people as possible kicks off at orientation week. I consider myself to be an outgoing person and I have never had trouble making friends, but at times orientation felt like a do-or-die friend-making competition, and I was definitely losing. Conversations lost their normal rhythms and took on an artificially sped-up tone where everyone was talking at once, trying to impress with their wit and self-confidence. People moved on minutes after they started talking to you if you didn’t immediately seem like one of the cool kids. Even I was doing it. At the end of each day I would fall into bed exhausted from socializing all day. And yet I didn’t feel like I was making friends--I felt like I was networking.
Orientation was successful in that by the time I started classes I knew a lot of people. But none I would consider a friend. I also felt like everyone else had already formed friendships and was having the time of their life. Turns out nobody really had. Even in the hyper-social world of business school, building friendships takes time. And it wasn’t like I was sitting home on Friday night--at first everyone socializes in a herd. Literally. Someone would pick a bar and later that night 350 people would show up. And after a while the speed-dating-on-speed feel to conversations is replaced by more normal interaction and you can get to the bottom of people’s personalities, not just their personas.
People also self-select through the activities they choose. The first friendships I forged were with people who chose, as I did, to be officers in a specific club. The cohort/block system also does a good job of putting you in daily close contact with a group of people so you can get to know each other better--but you have to make it work for you. In my block most people always sat in the same place for class, a practice I’ve always distained. Then one week I plunked down every day in the same spot and found that by the end of the week I chatted more with the people around me (who, by the way, always sat together), and that they started including me in all their lunch and weekend plans.
I also started making more friends when I became more open-minded about the people I thought I could relate to. I started business school in a very different place than most people, and I had an admittedly narrow view of who was worth being friends with. Then someone surprised me and I had to get more open-minded about who my friends could be. I graduated with friends from different countries, religions, professional backgrounds, races, political ideologies, and sexual orientations than me. It took time, but social life at the end of business school was a far cry from the frenetic networking of orientation week. Some of my very best friends I didn’t get to know well until my second year. But they, as with all true friends, were worth waiting for.
