how to meet curious people
My friend Eric recently wrote a blog post about isolation at Harvard that resonated with many readers. Several people have mentioned similar experiences at their own universities—student populations filled with clout-chasers, dispassionate hoop-jumpers, what have you.
At MIT, while these people certainly exist in droves—McKinsey information sessions are packed full, pre-professional clubs proliferate like dandelions—I’ve found it reasonably simple to avoid them and befriend people who express intellectual curiosity and genuine passion. To be fair, MIT may have cultivated a different culture than these other institutions, so this might be much easier for me than those at other schools, but here are some of the insights I’ve gleaned from my time in college:
I’m not involved in professional clubs.
My sophomore year here, I joined a business club because I was interested in entrepreneurship and had some vague inclinations towards consulting—I liked the idea of using my entire skill set instead of choosing between STEM and humanities. The meetings were boring, I didn’t particularly click with anybody there, and I realized that if I actually pursued a career in this direction, I would have to continue going to boring meetings surrounded by similar people. Sorry, maybe that’s harsh, and it’s obviously a generalization, but the realization was enough to turn me off from these type of clubs and this entire flavor of career.
I’m still on the mailing lists for various computer science groups because I want the job opportunities (and free food), but I don’t try to get involved with them at any deeper level. While I’m sure these clubs appeal to a large variety of people—it’s possible to want to cultivate your professional prospects while still being genuinely passionate about computer science, after all—they certainly attract careerists, and I’d like to avoid careerists.
Or, as Eric put it, “These organizations do nothing except act as vessels to sell [college] student resumes to company sponsors for thousands of dollars, then disburse that money on free food and branded merchandise for members.”
I take non-required classes.
Last month, I was trying to decide between taking 18.03 (Differential Equations) and 18.032 (also Differential Equations, but with a more mathematical and theoretical flavor). My friend was taking 18.03, while I knew nobody in 18.032. Due to a mandatory recitation for another class, I would have to skip 18.032 recitations, while I could attend 18.03 recitations. And did I really want to grind during senior spring, especially when I was also taking four other classes?
There were multiple reasons why I decided on 18.032. I dislike black-boxes—a system that functions with opaque inner workings, such as consumer electronic devices. 18.03 had theorems we didn’t prove, and we were expected to use those theorems for rote computations. This was quite irritating to me, because WolframAlpha already exists. (This was also why I didn’t like my introductory machine learning class last fall.) 18.032 traded breadth for depth, which I preferred.
But the atmosphere of 18.032 was just different. 18.03 is in 10-250, one of MIT’s big lecture halls, and has hundreds of students. It’s required in multiple majors, and lots of people are there to check it off the list. My other friend told me “nobody takes 18.03 seriously.” Meanwhile, 18.032 has about twenty people. The kids in the classroom seemed to care much more about math. That made sense, I suppose—they had voluntarily signed up for what was considered a more challenging course.
So I stayed, because I wanted to be around people like that.
I don’t hide from my passions.
At MIT, even before I got my book deal, many other writers would reach out to me, because they knew I liked writing a lot. I met a lot of my favorite people this way—like Michelle, who asked me to contribute to her science writing magazine, and is now pursuing a physics PhD, or Steven, who got a creative writing master’s degree in England and is now enrolled in an MD-PhD program. To be a creative writer at MIT, there’s a certain amount of going-against-the-grain required—a decision to sacrifice time and effort that could’ve been put towards your “real” career in STEM, to instead write. I was writing because it is something so deeply rooted in me that I couldn’t help but love it, but it became a fantastic way to attract likeminded people.
(As an aside, I think the meeting-cool-writers filter became less effective after I got the book deal, because suddenly there was social status attached to writing, and there were more people with ulterior motives trying to establish some connection with me.)
More generally, I don’t try to hide my interests out of fear of appearing uncool or something. That might sound ridiculous—we aren’t in high school anymore, after all—but even at MIT, people say I’m a nerd for caring so much about learning certain topics outside of class. Last week, my friend Wenjun and I started discussing continental drift because we have a shared interest in ancient Earth, despite being math and computer science majors, and somebody else asked, “Is this for a class or something?” He seemed confused why we wanted to talk about this when none of us were studying geology.
The way I figure it, if I’m open about what I care about, it’ll be a lot easier to meet people who care about the same things as me, and that’s worth looking uncool.
I have to be okay with loneliness.
This one is specifically for women and anyone else who might’ve been a minority within their interests (which I imagine is true for a lot of the STEM women out there). But as I tried pursuing my passions in computer science and mathematics beyond just taking classes, I noticed I was often the only woman there.
This might’ve started as early as middle school, when I joined Science Bowl and was one of two girls there out of about fifteen kids—I was captain of our B-team, and the rest of that team was boys older than me, and the only reason why it felt fine to lead them is probably because I was too young and oblivious to think there was any issue with the gender disparity.
More recently, during my summer math research project, I was the only woman in my group and one of four women (out of sixty-ish people) in the program. Last week, I tried going to a SIPB hackathon (the student club at MIT that makes cool stuff like our course scheduler) because I like building websites and wanted to help out, and I was the only woman there out of twenty-five or thirty people. By the way, all of these observations are made with the caveat that I was the only woman that I knew of, since I may be unaware of other people’s gender identities.
It’s sometimes hard to be the only woman in the room and I would love there to be more gender diversity within my interests. I also don’t blame anyone who can’t handle the isolation and otherness, and thus does not engage deeper with their interests. A lot of my confidence has come with age and being able to not care if guys ignore me, or condescend to me, or hit on me, but this was more difficult when I was younger.
I don’t know if this advice will work for anyone besides myself. There are many other traits and aspects I haven’t mentioned—I would consider myself to be outgoing, which certainly helps with meeting people—and again, I go to MIT. Friends who attend other prestigious institutions have had vastly different experiences, which makes sense, as I’d imagine that people who choose to attend elite schools probably prioritize professional development, economic and social capital, etc., and those priorities often squash one’s natural curiosity.
Overall, my belief is that like attract likes—the best way to find curious people is to be curious yourself. But of course, if you’re reading this blog post, you probably already knew that.