Friends after College?

Ya, get a glass of water/tonic/cranberry/whatever else. No one is forcing the liquor down your throat. It's only a big deal if you make it a big deal.

You can - but you likely won't make many friends doing that. I'm all for staying healthy and not drinking if that's your thing, but those "just tonic" guys tend to dampen the mood at the bar.

Its Totally up to you.... You wanna drink or not?

Nobody can forcing to you to get drink some liquor and yes you can go bar and make friends and chilled out with them......and have some soft drinks.

I've found that joining a sports league is a pretty good way to branch out.

For me, social life actually got a lot better after college and here is how I did it.

1 - If possible, get a social second job.

I started out working as a waiter at a restaurant and that was a great way to make some friends at times. Eventually I moved on to being a bartender on the weekends, started out getting day shifts (night shifts are very competitive) and it was a great way for me to meet a lot of people. Now if you're working the typical IB lifestyle of 80+ hrs a week, this not possible at all.

2- Join groups relevant to what you like.

Republican? Join a group for that. Democrat? Join a group for that. Whatever interests you, whether it be puppies at that, join a group for it.

3 - As another guy said, club sports.

It works and it brings out the competitiveness in you. I've made good friends with the same guys I played intramural soccer with, after a year we were almost like brothers.

4 - Become a regular at certain spots.

Whether it is the most packed bar in town or whatever place it may be, become a regular and be that guy who tips the bartenders well too. You can eventually make friends with other regulars who will call you out to parties and events that may be going on.

5 - Apartments with pools and a younger demographic.

I found this works well in big cities for some of my friends. Many of them moved into social apartments full of 20 somethings that had a swimming pool in them, it made it possible to make new friends and be social with people as opposed to living out in the suburbs.

In college, social life is somewhat handed to you but I found that I had other problems in college. After a couple of months, people became very cliquish and broke off into their own tight knit cliques. Some guys on here had the college experience and enjoyed the social life in college but I found myself being very lonely in college. A mixture of a tough major I hated (Biology), family issues, and the fact that my college attracted large amounts of upper middle class suburban kids that were generally snotty, pretentious, and judgmental made it difficult for me to have a good social life going.

Now I have different friends I can always go out with, dating life has gotten dramatically better (I get with hotter girls now), I can get into better parties without having to be in a given fraternity to do so, and I find that the people I run into are a lot more accepting.

To all of you college guys out there who feel lonely, believe me, with some work it can definitely get better after college.

Try networking events. Usually you can find lots of people similar in interests and background.

If you have co-workers you like, you can see if you can join their ECs; if one guy is on a sports team with 10 randoms, you might get along with some of the randoms and make new friends that way.

Have you tried making a Craigslist posting?

Get out of your shell and try new activities. I just went on a scuba diving liveaboard, without any friends/family, for the first time ever and it was a blast. If you're outgoing, you'll survive.

Look for alumni groups in the area or setup a WSO meetup. Real easy to do and great way to start convos due to similar interests. Before ya know it, you'll be pukin on the sidewalk with a smile on your face

Networking is important.

To maintain a healthy social life post-college, here's what I did:

1. If you live outside the happening area, go into the happening area. I lived 30 miles out of the happening area but I would commute in and crash on a lone friend's couch from college. You'll be excited while you're down there because you had to get dressed up and drive all the way down + you don't live there so you've still got the luster of visiting. To pay your friend back, buy dinner or a thirty rack and chip in for Ubers. With the guilt of overstaying your welcome on your buddies couch looming, there's added incentive to find someone to go home with. Make it a game and have a little fun with it.

2. Join a gym. I make great efforts to tune out the world when I'm at the gym (blasting Young Thug at full volume), but if you're a regular for long enough, you're going to start recognizing people. Recognizing people leads to a chin point, a chin point leads to what's up, a what's up leads to an introduction and before you know it, you've got gym buddies. Ask the guy / girl if he's down to hit 1000M in the pool, squad up for basketball or even handball if that's your jam. All of that is real casual. I've also ran into gym buddies at the bars and a few drinks + introductions to their friends are always in order.

3. Take women on dates. If I knew absolutely nobody in my locale, this would be number one for me. Drop the stigma and download Bumble or Hinge. Swipe until you get a match and go on multiple dates per girl. Eventually, you'll meet up with her and her friends, who probably have guys who are hanging with them, who are probably a lot like you by association. If you're dating a chick who loves Dungeons and Dragons, I'll wager she hangs with guys and girls who are at least into Magic the Gathering or complex board games.

4. My fourth and final would be to volunteer your time for a cause that you care about. Once again, there's going to be a lot of like-minded people not only volunteering, but also working full-time at the organization. This is yet another low-pressure situation for finding friends because you're not there to find friends, you're there to save the fucking world. Friends, females and a sick B School profile simply fall into place ;)

Meetup can be great, though you need to find the right group. Work and religious groups can be great too.

tinder

Have you tried walking outside?

David DeAngelo said that the best opening line when meeting girls is, "Hi, my name is [your name]."

My friend taught me the conversation process--FROG. When having an early conversation with someone (usually a girl on a first date or at a party) ask her about her friends, relationships, occupation, goals.

If you have a pretty face, no need to talk. If you're ugly, you better have money. If you don't, be prepared for an isolated life.

Your loss for words is likely coming from anxiety. You are freezing up or censoring yourself.

what dat mouf do?

nice shoes, wanna fuck? ...or na

Who are you trying to meet and why? Are you talking about non-sexual socially, in a career networking sense, or are you trying to pick up someone of the opposite sex, or same sex if that's your bag, and if the last option, are you male/female & hetero/homo?

In honor of St. Patrick's day:

"Do you have any Irish in you?"

"No."

"Want some?"

you'd be surprised how many people out there, even people who often seem outgoing, have a lot of nervousness when it comes to approaching random people they don't know.

"Hi, do you know any good lines to meet people?"

I think I heard this at some point during a later point in the night at the last WSO meet up

"Hello, could you kindly show me your O face?"

General template:

1: Introduce yourself

2: Ask a situational question about them(even a simple "So what brings you here?")

3: ?????????????????

4: PROFIT

Ask questions about them, make it about them. The less you talk the better, most people love talking about themselves.

Offer a warm handshake, say hello and then your name, and then volunteer some info about yourself: "Hi, my name's Varg, I'm from Bergen."

Or if you're at a networking event where there are a lot of young professionals, you can volunteer where you go to school or work as a conversation opener. Hopefully the other person responds in kind. Another good question for networking events that I like to ask is "So how was work today?" That gets them to open up a little more and allows you to follow up with, "Is that how a day typically goes for you?" etc.

Since you tagged it alumni networking, you have a natural opener as you already have something in common. That's a layup. In general, I would practice by saying hello to people as you walk by them, encounter them in an elevator, etc. Sometimes they won't be very agreeable and other times they will be. I would also realize that many, many people have anxieties about talking to strangers that they simply don't show.

It's interesting, I think that having soft skills is becoming something that stands out to people where before it was pretty commonplace to just talk to people face to face. Especially with my generation and the reliance on cellphones/technology it is even more important to be able to simply interact with other people. Technical skills, in my opinion, are much easier to learn/teach than human interaction. So much relies on your own confidence levels, EQ and other qualities which are more ingrained and intrinsic than learned. If you can become comfortable with simply walking up to people and talking to them, you will absolutely set yourself apart from the majority of people. Practice, as they say, makes perfect.

In the words of Joey Tribbiani, "Hey, how you doin" jk go up to them while your drunk, pet their hair and with a relaxing smile say "mmmm softttttt"

Coming Soon: The WSO Basic Social Interaction Prep Package (videos included!)

I think Addinator and DC Depository have very good points. One of the best ways to keep a conversation going is to look for queues/topics/similarities. One piece of advice that I've learned from Dale Carnegie's How to Meet Friends and Influence People is that you can be more interesting by being interested in other people. Don't ask people questions for the sake of keeping the conversation going, because that's going to be forced and will alienate people. Ask questions because you want to learn more about them.

This doesn't answer your question directly, but hopefully it gives insight on how to formulate lines, versus using canned lines to keep a conversation going.

Just don't stop asking questions. Then ask questions based on their answers to the previous questions.

Also, pointing out obvious things is an easy ice breaker. "That painting is really cool" "This song sucks...what? you like it?" "Yes! They have this beer I really like that no bar ever has, have you tried it?" "Big gulps eh?, well see ya later"

I have one that works effectively well only If the elevator is taking more than a minute to reach your floor.

You could say "looks like a busy day for the lifts..."

Address the one thing you have in common with person to kick off any conversation. If you're at a networking event for instance, ask that person "hey how's the night been going for you? a lot of people huh". Then you can go into "so what do you do" or "are you from the area" - from there find more about what you have in common with that person and look to make a genuine connection. This isn't about what can you do for me vs. what can i do for you - you have to go in with a mindset of making a connection.

I use the D.E.N.N.I.S. system

Well i might need another few months to confirm but i assume it will be like college. You stay fairly close with several guys but others become more of the occasional text, facebook post, etc and then others kind of fall away all together.

It varies. Obviously location is a huge factor. I have some closer friends from b-school that I still talk to regularly, and some that I don't.

I don't know how you'd use this to compare different schools. You're going to get to know your classmates regardless of where you go. It's really a question of how hard you try to keep in touch after.

It depends on the school, among other things. I've met many people at HBS who rarely keep in contact with anyone and I've meet people at smaller schools like Tuck where people remain friends well into the future. So, part of it is the person, part the school, part geography.

I'm more than 10 years out.

It's similar to college. Folks tend to keep in more regular contact in the first few years, but eventually grow apart. Part of it is geography, but a lot of it is simply just LIFE.

It's real easy to project your 20-something mentality and values towards the longer-term as if YOU will be static and unchanged.

Most people grow apart simply because life changes them. When you get married, you have kids, other stuff happens, you change careers, you move to a different part of the country or even another part of the world (or simply just moving from a city/urban lifestyle to a suburban one can make a HUGE difference). You will get caught up in your own everyday life dealing with jobs, commutes, family, that you're not going to be trying to reconnect with your b-school friends every weekend. Most of the time, it'll be every few weeks, maybe once every month and a half you get together for dinner, etc.

The fact that you're even worried (even a little) about this suggests that you're assuming you're going to care this much about all this when you're in your late 30s and 40s when you've got other more meaningful shit to worry about then.

You will have a great time in b-school, meet some great friends, hang out regularly for a few years afterwards pretty frequently, and over time that will taper off. And you will still be happy because you've probably got other things in your life going on by then.

Stop worrying about this stuff. You will make new friends outside of b-school. Your life isn't over after b-school. You will be just fine, and happy.

There's a clustering thing that goes on. Applicants or those who are 1-2 years away from applying to b-school, b-school students themselves, and recent b-school alums (less than 5 years out) may feel emotionally that b-school is the bees knees, but over time it becomes more and more a distant memory.

I work at a BB...

Monday through Thursday: fucked.

85% of my Friday and Saturday nights I am able to make it out. I leave office around 11 and party hard until 2-4.

It's not as bad as people make it out to be. If you have the desire to go out and get laid (and hopefully you do) you can certainly make it happen.

I mean if you have half a game you should be able to meet people by going out a couple of nights per week.

Are there a lot of attractive women in NYC? Are NYC chicks typically personable? Are you at an advantage given your occupation?

Dallas is amazing. 90% are blonde and nearly half are bombshells. And the best part is the lack of competition. In contrast to NYC (where I speculate being able to say you are an i-banker doesn't count for much) they completely eat it up here. But this is Dallas...investment bankers are few and far between. So the cliche works wonders, LOL. Instant "player" status.

tons of attractive women in NY, if you go to the right places, but being a banker in NYC is nothing special (dime a dozen).

i agree, friday and saturday nights are rough for meeting new people, but its all i can do. if i get out at a reasonable hour on the weekdays, you can bet i'm out at a bar getting shitfaced.

seems like you have a nice deal setup in dallas. kudos.

The amount of attractive NYC females is just as high as the number of arrogant male bankers