Professor School: Making new friends

Getting outside your own department is valuable and important

It surprised me how lonely it can be to become a new Assistant Professor. Much of your time is spent in power relationships, mostly with people who you have power over, and then once in a while there are people who have power over you. I remember the first time I settled into my new office, put some books on shelves, IT set up my machine, and, it was just quiet. Maybe someone would pop their head in once in a while. But everybody is busy, and once you arrive, you just become part of the landscape. How can you make this place your home?

As an untenured professor, you’re free to make friends with other professors in your department, and in some places you’re downright expected to. But even if you’ve managed to build good friendships within your department, it helps to stretch beyond.

As for the people in your own lab and who you teach, well, you can’t be real friends with them if you’re the one signing their paychecks, assigning them grades, signing the page on the front of their thesis. There were generations of scientists who ended up sleeping with their own students and eventually marrying them, but those days belong in the past. I’d like to think I have great and rewarding relationships with many of my students and mentees, but if it’s a power relationship, are they a friend who I can open up to about my own challenges and problems (including ones that they may be causing?). I’ve become friends with people in my lab, but the friendship evolved after they left my lab. Thinking that lab members are family, or a your own friends, is a gateway to exploitative or toxic behavior.

So, look beyond your department for friendships. Perhaps outside your college if you’re at a big place. The biggest reason is to enrich your life by having friends, including those who you can see in person on a regular basis. Your pool of friends is just that much bigger when you expand it across the whole campus.

I don’t think we should make genuine friends for strategic reasons, but it is helpful and pragmatic to have someone who you can trust who understands both you and your institution to be able to put into perspective things that may be happening in your own department.

You can categorize departments into two flavors, and having friends outside those departments helps navigate both kinds. The first flavor is a department that is fractured, with people having competing agendas and a different set of priorities. Obviously having people in your corner who can provide an independent perspective on conflicts (which may be ancient and cryptic in origin) can be huge. The second flavor is where most everybody gets along and has a shared set of mission. This is a better place to be on a day to day basis, but still, having outside perspectives is useful. Departments that get along really well might have a little too much groupthink, and seeing other ways things can operate provides good perspective. Also, some departments like to think that they’re the second kind but are really are the first kind, and even diagnosing that can be hard from the inside.

How do you make friends on a big campus when institutions are so siloed? That’s a challenge. I’ve noticed not just for myself, but for other people, that some of our better friends around campus are the people who we got to know during new faculty orientation activities. I suppose that’s because it’s one of the few, if the only, structured opportunity to interact with people from different disciplines that happens for new faculty.

How else to make friends on campus? You don’t want to overcommit to too many campus-wide service leadership activities, but if you wind up on the space committee or the sustainability advisory board or the writing across the curriculum committee, this is a chance to get to know other folks. I’m not sure I have any additional wisdom or advice about how to make friends, but I’m just here to say it’s important.

It’s really hard to find the time to just hang out with folks. You might be inclined to eat lunch al desko every day, but imagine if you had a friend in a different building who you met up with coffee or lunch once in a while. I’m also writing this as a reminder for myself as much as you. Now that I’m on sabbatical, it’s taking a little bit more effort to stay connected to people I’ve known for a long time as I dig into just a few things rather deeply. The place where I’m doing my sabbatical (the Natural History Museum) has a set of absolutely great folks and these folks often take the time to go outside into the garden to have lunch together. It’s pretty cool, and I hope I take this with me beyond sabbatical.