Graduate school

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I'm not going to graduate school to meet women, rest assured. I just have two preoccupations, looking for dates with girls and studying what I want to study, and the two seem to be clashing.

I'm in the same situation. Or rather, the same boat as far as grad school goes, maybe not as far as the relationships I'm looking for.

My biggest, deepest fear is not having time to spend with anyone outside of my program. Since high school I have mostly spent time around other science people, now I really feel the urge to branch out and meet people who are doing COMPLETELY different things with their lives than I am. The dread haunts me every so often, but I haven't gotten busy with research yet so it's not too bad.

In a way it's a very unfortunate time to start feeling that urge, but I feel I will need a PhD to do what I want with my life, and spending lots of time at a boring job isn't going to help me feel much better about my life, social or otherwise, no matter how hard it is in grad school.

I plan to do as much of my socializing as possible with undergraduates. I'm already starting to veer off in that direction, and did in my last PhD program, which I quit mainly because of the location of the campus, although it also was tough to make it in the social environment. I met a few really interesting people through undergraduate clubs, though, some of whom are still friends. I'm already in a new club here.

In my old program, though, it was nothing but depressing to hang out with the other grad students. Most of them felt WAY too "adult" for me, as if they were ready to really "get serious" about their lives. And I don't mean their intellectual dedication--in fact many of them seemed to regard their research as just a job like any other, as opposed to how I am interested in it for its own sake. Hanging out with them felt more like if I were to hang out with my parent's friends than college students. The exact point when my life started to look up again, was when I made some friends who were also more in the experimental phase of their lives. It may be different for you though. And at my new university I feel even the other grad students are ore interesting than at the old one.

One of my best friends from graduate school frequently spent his free time hitting on the undergraduate girls and also girls at local community colleges. Though he's marginally on the AS spectrum, he's gotten a lot of dates and phone #'s from them.

Undergraduates are, though not out of the question, difficult to "approach" because they generally are Dutch people who speak Dutch. Though they generally speak fluent English as well, I feel like I wouldn't be getting off on the right foot if the first thing she knows about me is that I don't speak Dutch.