<p>So to start off, this really isnt the usual CC request for help (not in ugrad, in grad). Im having quite a bit of trouble making friends and i kinda need some advice/pointers (this has been going on for quite some time).</p>
<p>A bit of back story, during undergraduate i didn't have really any friends. Only occasional acquaintances who would eventually stop hanging out with me/ect. At first this didn't really bother me. I was heavily involved in research from second semester freshman year until senior year. I always thought it would just come naturally at that time that id meet people/ect. Unfortunetly i ended up spending my last year in college quite alone. I then thought that when i left to go work at a research facility that id be able to meet people in the area i worked in (i lived in a major US city). I spent about a year and a half there and didn't meet anyone really at all (the people i worked with were all around 40 with kids/ect, so i really couldn't ever hang out with them/ect). So i left to go back to college for a graduate degree (which my parents were insanely ****ed about). </p>
<p>Now im here and i still haven't been able to really meet anyone to hang out with. i work in a research lab and i get along well in general with the people i work with but they all go do there own thing after 5pm (wives/husbands/bf's/ect). Same thing goes with people i meet in classes, were all generally cool with other but were all totally different in what we like to do so getting together with them outside of class for anything non business/school related hasn't worked out. </p>
<p>So basically im asking how to go about meeting people for non business purposes? I want to fix this and have risked quite a bit of money on this (leaving a $150k a year job to try and become mentally happy). Is there anything people would recommend to me on how to actually meet people (for friends)? </p>
<p>What kind of research have you done, if you don’t mind me asking?</p>
<p>One way to meet people for non-business purposes is on forums on the internet, like this one. Though i consider friends serious business. </p>
<p>Did you always plan to go to graduate school?</p>
<p>WOW, your account is 5 years old!</p>
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<p>^ insightful post from your 2007 past-self!</p>
<p>If that all still applies, then you know what the problem is (shyness) and you know how to make friends despite it (by not letting it control you by doing all the things that it normally inhibits you from doing).</p>
<p>Of course it’s really hard, but your posting here about it, which means it’s really important to you at the moment to figure out.</p>
<p>If you said - I have no friends, can I follow you out the door tonight to whatever thing you’re doing after 5pm? - to each of those researches I would hope at least one would be okay with the idea. And that’s how you make a friend I think. But that sounds pretty hard.</p>
<p>Yes haha, its actually kinda sad in its own right since a majority of the people who post here likely weren’t even in high school when i joined. Damn getting old :-P. Should have been researching eternal youth in undergrad. </p>
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<p>Actually kinda a weird combination of geoscience and high performance computing. </p>
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<p>Yes, part of the reason i did not accept a full time position anywhere outside of school, i had a weird timing with my gre’s where i had a sort of a gap year after college where i basically worked alot both as an employee and a contractor somewhere just saving up cash for graduate school (if i had to pay).</p>
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<p>Yeah, you know for a while it was going alright, but then as people i knew started graduating i never really was able to replace them. Now with only taking specific classes related to my graduate work the pool of people who i see on a day to day basis is really low. </p>
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<p>I’m not sure if that would work, like i said most of them have family’s (most even have kids, which is crazy, not sure how they balance working at a lab and kids). So obviously i dont blame them at all for wanting to spend time with their kids/etc.</p>