Scheme B: “First Week Social”
Published (gregorian) (ornellember)
Tags: scheme
social seriesToday is 28 B. I am waiting for my brother and grandma to arrive at the train station, and of course, just remembered it’s my deadline to write my second strategy. Luckily, I’d come up with a subject a while ago, which I’ll call First Week Social.
# The story
In the French school system, you get put into “classes” which are basically groups of around 30 kids who have the same teachers. We don’t really have pick-and-choose classes like in the Anglo-Saxon system, so basically you spend your entire year with the same 30 kids every day for 8 hours a day. It had never been a problem until I got to the 10th grade (or seconde,) which is the first year of high school in the French system.
That year, I showed up to the first day of class, and for the very first time, I knew no one in my class. Or almost no one. There was one kid I kind of knew; so I sat next to her, and stuck with her. We were also two of the only French kids in that class, and I was the only non-white kid. Very quickly, cliques formed, and before I knew it, I was out of all of them. I spent the year with very few friends, and it was one of my most miserable years — I still had an active social life outside of my class, but for 8 hours every day, I was kind of ostracized.
The next year, the same situation happened, with a brand new batch of kids. However, this time, I had a strategy. Starting in the hallway before entering the classroom, I deliberately started conversations with everyone that happened to enter the 5-yard radius around me. Have you had this teacher before? Wow, cool jacket. Can’t wait for lunch. It was not particularly interesting stuff, and nothing deep, just starting a basic level of acquaintanceship with two thirds of the class, which of course still completely exhausted me.
That one week of effort did pay off. The next week, I was back to my normal level of social activity, which basically equates to being a hermit, but everyone knew me, and they knew me as a nice, fun person, and included me in conversations and plans. I had no problem fitting in that year, or the year after, or almost every time I used this strategy.
# My plan
My goal was to establish a baseline of acquaintanceship with as many people as I could in the group. I wasn’t really trying to make friends — to use a silly coding analogy, it was a breadth-first approach, not a depth-first approach. The aim was simply not to be a stranger, so that, as cliques formed, I wouldn’t be an outsider.
# The time it failed
There was one time I tried to apply this strategy and failed. It was at a summer internship in college. There were something like 6 interns; some were extroverts, some knew each other before, all (except me) were born-and-raised American. We spent most of our days together. I did push myself socially the first week, but it wasn’t enough — I couldn’t quite crack it, and I was still an outsider to the group. I’d attribute it to not really being able to find much in common with anyone — since then, I’ve tried to supplement this strategy with also trying to build one-on-one relationships with individuals by, say, asking them to lunch, but I’ve accepted it’s not infallible.
# PS
This was an unexpectedly vulnerable post to write. I think it’s because I don’t remember ever reading something like this before. It kind of makes me sound like an alien who can‘t intuitively figure out human behavior and has to study it — but I’ve had conversations about this topic with friends, and it makes me pretty confident that this is a common experience for humans, so I wanted to share it.