There are very few spaces in graduate school that feels low-stakes. Most activities revolve around the giving and receiving of feedback, especially departmental workshops and conferences. And when graduate students interact with professors, the purpose is typically also to receive feedback. While this is absolutely necessary for graduate school to be effective, it can also grind people down. There are also department socials, but they rarely connect students and faculty. Is there room for a third kind of event?
During my Ph.D. my friend Donna Hoang and I founded a group called the Southeast Asia in Social Science Group (SASS). It took us a while to figure out what this group should look like, but we ended up coming with a few principles. The goal of the group would not be the typical grad school exercises of providing feedback on papers, or reading academic books or papers together. Instead, we wanted to bring like-minded graduate students and faculty who study Southeast Asia across departments together to meet, and hope that these unusual meetings would build new connections and ideas. (Innovation happens through the spontaneous fusion of unlike ideas!)
I decided that we would hold a series of faculty “meet-and-greets.” These events would have no agenda: we would just put a professor who studies Southeast Asia in a room with an interdisciplinary bunch of graduate students, and let spontaneous conversations arise. There are no stakes because there are no objectives. The point is simply to learn more about the faculty member, and learn more about each other.
To emphasize that this is not the typical workshop, we decreed that all our faculty meet-and-greets would have event names that 1) is centered around a single food and 2) either alliterate or rhyme. It was a restriction that led to all sorts of fun foods that you usually wouldn’t find at a grad school event, and also many very funny event names over the years, such as Donuts with Dan, Tea with Trent, Chicken with Hicken, Crab with Cruz*, and Wontons with Webb.
(*We didn’t actually have the budget for crab, poor grad students that we were, so we had to settle for crab rangoons. Which did not detract from the event!)
My favorite event was, of course, Chicken with Hicken — how do you top a name like that?
At least one professor that we hosted remarked that he had never been to an event where there was no set agenda and the goal was just to talk and get to know graduate students. (We ended up having a great session!)
These events became really special for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was a much more relaxed way to get to know a professor. Secondly, because each session was centered on a single professor, grad students really got to know them and their journey through academia. Third, as this group was interdisciplinary (Southeast Asia being the only connecting theme), we got to meet with professors who we would usually never interact with: political scientists in conversation with scholars of Southeast Asian Buddhism, for instance. Eventually, we did also branch into hosting some research-related events, but the faculty meet-and-greets continued to be the mainstay of SASS.
I believe that there is a place in grad school for a third type of event between a workshop and a social. In addition, there is demand for interdisciplinary meetups oriented around area studies, something which I suspect may be underserved at many universities. It doesn’t take much: Pick a plate, find a pun, and add a region if you’d like. If you decide to try something similar, I’d love to hear how it goes!