Social Engineering by Allison E. '27

Alternatively, how to build a cult! Only it’s not a cult, it’s just a group of friends, I swear!

Alternatively, mansplain manipulate man…ufacture mischief? In which I mansplain how my friends manipulate each other manufacture mischief opportunities to spend time together.

So many ways to title this blog, so many ways to sound truly, deeply weird.

But the urge to yap has taken hold, and I shall oblige it, because orientation is beginning on campus right now!⁠01 I am literally on a plane headed back to campus to help with this, luxuriating in the joys of free Starlink wifi As this post goes up, prefrosh are jumping right into Residence Exploration (REX!!), where they’ll explore MIT’s many different residential communities and make their final choices about where to live.

REX is fun, and REX is exciting, but REX can also be a bit of a stressful time. People talk a lot about how important your living group is to your “college experience,” whether it’s becoming best friends with your roommates or being super involved with your dorm. And they’re not wrong about how great residential community can be–it’s a big part of many MIT students’ lives, and living with your friends means you see them organically every day. This is particularly useful when the rest of college is… not super conducive to that. There’s no single cafeteria where everyone eats lunch, and no shared bell schedule that determines when everyone is free, so if you don’t literally live with your friends, it takes effort to organize time with them.

Residential communities are the cheat code, so finding a good fit for yourself can feel high-stakes. I was super nervous about this during REX, and even more so after I realized that my dorm floor wasn’t the best fit for me⁠02 even though the community was so cool 😭 . Some people have zero problem with this, whether they’re just great at planning things with friends or don’t really need to be around people all the time. Unfortunately, though, that’s not me, and I was really worried that I would miss out on the closeness of those residential friendships.

But fear not! As I’ve learned over the last year, residential communities are absolutely not your only option. There are so many ways to find your people in college, and I want to talk about one specific option: friend groups.

As middle school as that phrase feels, my “friend group” has been the best part of my MIT experience. Of course, 99% of the reason for this is that MY FRIENDS ARE AWESOME AND I LOVE THEM SO MUCH. But I’ve already talked about this, and also you’re not allowed to steal my friends, so I want to focus on something much smaller but still pretty cool: When it comes to finding consistent opportunities to spend time with friends, the “group” part of “friend group” can be great at mirroring the dynamic of residential friendships. If of my friends didn’t know each other, I’d have to constantly coordinate disjoint times with each of them independently just to hang out, and with the way our schedules interlock, that’s tough. Sith a group, we still coordinate stuff one-on-one like this when we can, but since we all do know each other, we can unlock so much more hangout time just by gathering whoever is free at any given time.

Again, since we’re focusing on the “group” part of “friend group,” you’re on your own when it comes to finding the friends⁠03 anyways, the ~mysteries of friend-making~ are opaque to me) . What I’m more interested in is how that nebulous initial cluster of half-strangers becomes an actual, solid friend group that replicates the closeness of residential friendships. The social engineering! The cult formation! The manipulation!

RE: social engineering: I was very annoyed to discover that this term is usually used to describe advanced phishing techniques, which is… not what I’m talking about. The more relevant definition is this: “the use of centralized planning in an attempt to manage social change and regulate the future development and behavior of a society.” Which… does sound very manipulative, and I swear I’m not trying to promote manipulating your friends 😭. Or at least, not unless you’re all doing it to each other. To spend more time together! So it’s really just… persuasion. For an excellent cause.

Anyways. That’s what I really want to talk about (although you’d never guess from how it took me 700 words to get to the point…). You have a group of people who like each other, but you all live in different places, and there’s no organic impetus for you to assemble. How do you fix this?

Group chat group chat group chat

First of all, group chat. I mean, you don’t need me to tell you that, but let’s go deeper.

I feel like group chats are such a defining feature of our generation’s social structure–and by structure I mean structure. There’s nothing as cut-and-dry as being in the group chat or not being in it. That really, really sucks sometimes, and I imagine that people pre-internet had much less rigidly defined⁠04 We literally refer to our friend groups by the name of the group chats sometimes friend groups than we do now.

As exclusionary as group chats can be, though, they’re also one of the best resources for facilitating opportunities to hang out. Without a group chat, the only way⁠05 unless you met through a specific, repeated activity you’ll all end up in the same place again is by pure chance. Even if it’s awkward to start one, I suggest making group chats early, and often.

Group Chat Architecture

While we’re on the topic of making group chats, though, I want spread some personal propaganda: I really believe that group chats should be constructed with the same attention you’d give to crafting a physical living space!! Most people make group chats on Instagram, or Whatsapp, or Facebook Messenger⁠06 Not entirely sure why this is a thing, but MIT uses Messenger a lot (maybe because we’re 20 minutes away from where Facebook was founded?)… I’m not the biggest fan LOL . This is perfectly fine for smaller groups, but once you start getting more than [insert arbitrary number… 7??] people, you might have more conversation than a single thread can handle.

Say you’re in the middle of planning an outing to Boston Commons, and you have to confirm that Person A is free on Saturday at 12:00. In the meantime, though, person B has a funny story from class, and person C wants to know where everyone is eating dinner. Boston Commons gets buried, person A doesn’t see the message, and on Saturday you find out that person A can’t make it, and now everyone is sad :(

This is why I’m a pretty big fan of Discord, because with a Discord server, you basically have one group chat with many different “channels”, or threads of conversation. You can have one for announcements, so people don’t miss that Boston Commons is happening on Saturday at 12:00. You can have one to post group dinner receipts, one to collect quotes, or even one for extremely scientific polls⁠07 milk first or cereal first? or perhaps a third option: no milk at all, just raw . Then you can go further and make sub-group chats–for example, a temporary “thread” that everyone going to Boston Commons can add themselves to⁠08 Thus, no “hey can someone add me to the other chat”, nothing feels exclusionary, etc. . Discord servers also allow for concrete manifestations of inside jokes, whether it’s through custom emojis, channel names, wonky bots, or stupid nicknames. Just like how you’d decorate a physical living space!

Leveraging Group Chats

Thinking about group chats as living spaces isn’t just an infrastructure thing, though–it’s even more relevant when you’re actually using them to gather people. With residential communities and their physical living spaces, one of the best things is that you can just pop into the hallway or floor lounge to find dinner companions. But with a non-residential friend group, there’s nowhere you can reliably find everyone.

That is, except for the group chat!!

Looking for a lunch buddy? Text the group chat. Need some homework help? Text the group chat. Want someone to do something very stupid but very funny with you? Text the group chat. The group chat can function just like a physical floor lounge or hallway in terms of gathering people together, and in fact, in some ways a group chat is even more useful, because you lift the need for physical & temporal alignment in organic interactions. If you have a random thought, or see something funny in the hallway, or just feel like talking, you can message the group chat at any time. More importantly, you unlock the ability to plan group activities without having to gather everyone in person. I seriously have NO IDEA how people did this before smartphones…

Planning Shenanigans

Even with a group chat, though, it can still be a bit tricky to plan things. (After all, residential communities have funding and social chairs whose job is planning activities.) We’re all still figuring this out, but here’s a few observations from last year: First, MIT has so many free student events going on all the time! Look at posters, keep an ear open, and most importantly, check your dormspam⁠09 Emails sent out to pretty much the whole school advertising events. BY THE WAY!! IF YOU’RE A PREFROSH–you won’t automatically receive dormspam unless you add yourself to your dorm’s mailing list. Which you really really should!! . It’s a lot easier to gather folks to go to a pre-established event. Also! Make sure you know what times people wake up. We never did anything on a weekend before noon⁠10 ...actually probably more like 2:00 pm , because all of us were asleep. Even when we said we’d wake up for something, we did not 😭. Finally, proposing shenaniganery in person has been slightly more successful, even if the details are worked out online. You get a better gauge of people’s interest, and humans are very bandwagon-y, so if we see each other interested in an activity, we’re more likely to go.

Routines

Ok, so shenanigans are awesome, but people are busy allll the time, and consistently planning things still takes effort. This is where routines come in! Every day, as classes wind down, my friends and I always gather in the same space⁠11 I refuse to share the secret >:) to study together. From there, we grab dinner together around 6:00, and after that a subset of us will even branch off to study in one of the dorms. We try to send location updates to the group chat so that even more people can join, but at any point in this journey, someone might send a variant of the “where (are) people/ppl?” text (>100 of these show up in our chat). More ways to leverage the group chat! Hooray!

It genuinely makes such a difference to have this routine, and to know that I can find people to hang out with if I need. I might have club meetings every Tuesday afternoon, and others may have classes or rehearsals or very necessary naptime, but if I’ve had a rough day of classes, I know for sure that at least one person will be in our study space to goof off with between 2:00 and 6:00 pm. We don’t need to plan days in advance every time we want to study or grab dinner together, we just do. Like clockwork. And that consistency means a lot during the chaos of the school year, so if you’re able to create some group routines, they can be great.

Andddd now you have a cult!

Or, well, maybe you’re 10% of the way there. Kinda.

Jokes aside, these structures really have helped me feel just as close with my friends as if they all slept two doors down the hall. I’m actually glad that my residential community didn’t quite work out, because that’s partly what lead me to the friends I have now. They really are absolutely the best part of MIT, and getting to see them almost every day means the world ☺️.

Then again, everything I’ve described here is very anecdotal and specific to my friends and I. The structures that work for you could be completely different, and besides, structures can only do so much. It’s really just about finding your people, which you can do through your dorm, but also so many other ways that aren’t right here, right now. You will find your people! You will find your people, and you will find whatever dynamics work for you, and you will make plenty of mischief together :D